


Brighter Than the Milky Way

by A_Diamond



Series: Milky Way [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Astrophysicist Castiel, Background Rufus/Bobby/Ellen, Bisexual Dean, Blow Jobs, Communication, Developing Relationship, Dirty Talk, Dom Castiel/Sub Dean Winchester, Engineering Professor Dean, From Sex to Love, Frottage, Hair-pulling, Hand Jobs, Light Angst, Light Bondage, M/M, Masturbation, Nipple Play, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Pansexual Castiel, Panty Kink, Past Relationship(s), Porn With Plot, Praise Kink, Publicity, Rimming, Semi-Public Sex, Showers, Social Media, Switching, Topping from the Bottom, Webcam/Video Chat Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-29 05:17:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 48,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10847232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond/pseuds/A_Diamond
Summary: Breaking down on the way to give a talk at the University of Kansas turns out to be more gratification than frustration for celebrity astrophysicist Castiel Novak when he's rescued by one of KU's own professors. Dean Winchester—mechanical engineer and fan of famous nerds—invites Cas into his home and his bed while he sorts out his car troubles.What starts out as hot sex continues as hot sex, but also grows into a more profound emotional connection as the two get to know each other outside the sheets.





	1. Rigel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [allrealities](https://archiveofourown.org/users/allrealities/gifts).



> For allrealities:
> 
> Thank you for your patience on this, and your generous donation! <3 And thank you, thank you for the opportunity to write these two nerds being nerdy and in love. And lust.
> 
>  **Note:** as an influential scientist, Cas should know and _encourage_ better, but I'm hand-waving safe sex practices because this is fic, not life. Especially with new/unknown partners, please use protection and negotiate beforehand, not in the middle of things.

* * *

The side of I-35 right in the middle of a stretch of nothing wouldn’t have been Castiel Novak’s first choice of places to break down. Given his selection of options, and assuming that _not breaking down_ wasn’t among them, he would’ve greatly preferred the parking lot of a reputable garage. Failing that, close enough to civilization that he’d have a hope of finding such a place without the assistance of his dead phone would’ve been a fair compromise.

Still, there was something to be said for the lack of light pollution. He tilted his head up to admire the line of densest stars, the Milky Way: the galactic disk made visible in points of light and barely discernible clouds of dust. It had been too long since he last set aside time to enjoy the night sky as observable to the naked eye. Now he had an undetermined but almost certainly long period of opportunity to do just that, as he waited to see if rural midnight traffic would bring him any help before daylight.

He only had himself to blame for the situation in which he found himself, which helped a surprising amount to ease his frustration at it. It had been his decision to drive instead of letting Hannah book him a flight; he had forgotten to charge his phone while it was providing directions for the six-hour drive; he had failed to take his car in for its yearly maintenance for... Three years, probably. That was as long as he’d had it, so at least it couldn’t be longer than that.

So he settled himself on the barely warm hood of the Tesla and commenced with the stargazing. Orion caught his eye first, as it often did, reigning prominently in the winter sky. It was the first constellation he’d learned, standing out in the backyard with Jimmy and their mother.

_“Orion, the hunter. You see those three stars right there? Look, follow my finger, just up and to the right of that tall tree. That’s his belt. And then his shoulders, there...”_

He’d been taken with the universe instantly, more so than his twin, but Jimmy had still let Cas drag him out to watch meteor showers and gape at supermoons, listened to him explain black holes no fewer than six times over the span of their fourth grade year, and even joined the middle school astronomy club in solidarity. Cas had joined the math club for Jimmy in return, and also provided his niece with a sizeable college fund thanks to his ‘incredible nerdiness,’ so Jimmy’s patience paid off.

Cas’s obsession with the universe had expanded with his knowledge of it—and he could admit that it was an obsession, in childhood and through to the present. But it was an obsession that sustained him both mentally and professionally, so it didn’t really count as a problem in his mind.

Reaching celebrity status in arguably one of the nerdiest sciences possible had been accidental and entirely shocking, but he enjoyed the chance to share his passion and educate people. Banal talk show hosts asking trivial questions about his favorite nebula or constellation weren’t as intellectually satisfying—and tested his mediocre people skills—but at least he had answers prepared.

NGC 6302, also known as the Butterfly Nebula, and Orion.

The flare burned out. He considered whether to light another immediately or save it; he only had two left, which combined would last an hour if he was very lucky, and potentially many more hours of darkness, if he was not very lucky.

Night had leeched the last of the faint residual heat from the air, and he was starting to feel the cold. A jacket would have been more efficient prior to his stargazing, but it would still help. There was one in his suitcases... somewhere.

As he was digging through the second, his messy efforts leaving it in no worse shape than his usual packing skills, he heard the hum of an approaching engine. In his haste to flag it down, he straightened to far, too quickly, and his skull reverberated with its impact against the lid of the trunk.

Cursing and clutching what would undoubtedly turn into a spectacular bruise, he recovered just in time to see the car drive past in the opposite direction. It slowed before he could lose hope, headlights swinging around to wash over him as the car turned and pulled onto the shoulder behind him. The driver cut the engine, but left the lights on as he stepped out; Cas could only see his silhouette against the brightness.

“You need some help, man? I’m pretty good with—oh, damn.” He let out a low whistle. “Not a lot I can do with one of those. Battery run out?”

Cas turned away from the shadow to frown at his car. “It shouldn’t have... I charged in Columbia.”

When he looked back at the man, he stood motionless and wordless in the beam of light for longer than seemed natural in the middle of a conversation.

Cas could only guess at the reason for the disconnect, so he clarified, “Missouri? It’s about two hours—”

“Yeah. No. I know. Sorry, just.” The man’s friendly and confident voice had tensed, coming out in shaky, unconnected bursts. He cleared his throat. “Holy shit. You’re Castiel Novak.”

Cas still wasn’t used to being recognized on the street; wasn’t sure he ever would be. More people knew his name than his face, though Hannah and her talk show schedule were on a campaign to change that. He went along with it as much as patience allowed, but he’d watched some of his own interviews and knew he came off stiff no matter how much Hannah coached him. Even when they got him talking on one of his many passions, he struggled to use plain language without sounding too condescending about it.

Or swearing at the creationists they frequently wanted him to “debate.” Hannah had eventually learned to turn down those requests, after his argument with Rev. Zachariah Adler nearly came to blows.

And on the rare occasions when he met fans unexpectedly, he was never quite sure what they wanted from him. He worried about disappointing their expectations. Though looking a mess on the side of the road with a dead car, he was pretty sure expectations couldn’t get any lower.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Um. Hello.”

“God, I’m being weird. Sorry, again.”

The man laughed a little and stepped out of the direct line of the headlights so Cas could finally make out more than just a shadow. He wore sturdy jeans, a plaid flannel open over a grey t-shirt, and an embarrassed smile.

Holding out his hand, he said, “Dean Winchester. I’m a fan of your work, I've been looking forward to your lecture here for months. But probably more important to you right now, I’ve got an uncle with a tow truck not too far from here.”

Dean’s grip was firm and callused, skin warmer than Cas’s.

“I’m very happy to hear both of those things. Do you think he’d be willing to come out so late? If not, I just need a cab and I can leave it and talk to him tomorrow. I don’t know about the car, but my phone battery is definitely dead.”

“Nah, Rufus is a night owl.” Dean pulled a phone from his pocket and flashed Cas a startlingly charming grin. “We’ll get you taken care of, Dr. Novak. I mean, to an extent. I know we don’t have any Tesla service centers in Lawrence, and last I checked there weren’t any in all of Kansas, so... That might be a little trickier.

“But we’ll get you and, uh, Orion somewhere safe for the night, at least.” He sounded amused rather than judgemental about Cas’s vanity license plate. If he was a fan, he probably knew the story.

While Dean made the call, rambling up and down the side of the highway and laughing every few seconds, Cas finally located his jacket and got his bags closed up. Dean finished and walked back over just as he was shutting the trunk.

“He’s on his way. We’re a good twenty, twenty-five minutes from the yard, so he’ll probably be here in fifteen. You wanna wait in my car? We can crank up the heat—I don’t know how long you’ve been out here, but I’m already getting cold.”

The inside of Dean’s car was delightfully warm even before he restarted the engine, and Cas relaxed into his seat gratefully. Even the loud rock music that blared out of the speakers when Dean turned the key didn’t faze him, though Dean still hurried to lower the volume.

“Sorry. Helps keep me awake on the drive, you know?”

Cas preferred coffee, but nodded anyway.

They fell quiet. Out of the corner of his eye, Cas saw Dean’s fingers drumming on the steering wheel in time to the song. Absorbed in the music, he soon started nodding along to it as well.

He was, Cas couldn’t help but notice, an incredibly attractive man: strong jaw, sharp cheekbones, dimpled chin. A bit of scruff, though not as pronounced as Cas’s five o’clock shadow. Then Dean began to slap the wheel and bang his head in earnest, lower lip caught between his teeth, and attractive didn’t begin to cover it.

Cas had to bite his own lip at the sight.

Catching himself, Dean stopped drumming and turned his head to Cas—which meant he caught Cas’s blatant staring. His teeth sunk even deeper into the soft curve of pink as he grinned. It was a very promising grin.

But, when he finally released the reddened flesh to speak, he didn’t offer the innuendo or invitation Cas was hoping for. Instead, looking so shy that Cas wondered if he’d imagined the flirtation to begin with, Dean said, “When you came out, it was—I mean, I’m sure it was a big deal for you, too, obviously.”

It had been, though he hadn’t cared about the professional fallout. Which wasn’t to say it hadn’t happened. His publisher had dropped him, and his agent; so he found Hannah and made himself more successful than he ever would have been with them. No, what had really been hard was one of the very few serious fights he’d ever had with Jimmy.

_“Don’t do this to me, Castiel!”_

_“This isn’t even remotely about you!”_

_“The fuck it isn’t. I work for a company with a morality clause in my contract and my identical twin wants to tell the world he’s pansexual. You know exactly what they’re going to think about me.”_

In the end, it had been Jimmy’s young daughter Claire who talked him around—and into leaving his job at the homophobic religious non-profit. Cas and Jimmy came out of it close as ever, but it had been a rough time for both of them.

Dean went on, “But for me. I was an assistant professor, not even tenured yet, and—my family was fine.” He laughed, the same bright noise as when he’d been talking to his uncle. “But you know how academia can be, no matter how enlightened they like to think they are. There was one openly gay full prof in the entire engineering department, but he didn’t come out until long after tenure, and even that’s kinda different than being bi, you know?

“So I just wanted to say, you know, thanks. Thank you for putting yourself out there like that.”

In other circumstances, Cas might’ve been disappointed about the switch from suggestive to sincere, but Dean’s experience mirrored his own, which was part of the reason he’d made the decision he had. He’d heard similar stories from more people than he’d ever expected, scientists and academics and even students, and was touched to know he’d made a difference each time. That was so much more important to him than getting laid.

“I’m glad I could help in some way.” They exchanged a smile. “So, engineering? Between that and an uncle with a tow truck, I suspect you weren’t lying about being good with cars.”

Dean’s grinning, “Well, actually,” was interrupted by a long honk as a tow truck pulled up next to them. Cas hadn’t noticed the headlights. Apparently neither had Dean, who startled at the sound.

“Speak of the grumpy devil.”

He got out of the car and Cas followed suit, coming around the far side of the car just in time to see Dean extracting himself from an embrace with an older man. Dean’s uncle said something Cas couldn’t hear, then they both laughed and Dean smacked Rufus on the shoulder.

“Great to see you,” he said as Cas approached. Then, turning, “Dr. Novak, this is my uncle Rufus.”

“Thank you for coming,” Cas said, shaking Rufus’s hand. “I think I would have been out here all night without you and Dean.”

Rufus waved him off. “I was up anyway. You got somewhere you want me to take it, or just to the yard?”

“The yard will be fine.” He didn’t have a plan yet, and coming up with one could wait until the morning, or even the day after, after his talk at the University of Kansas. He could afford the impound fees.

“You got it.” Rufus got back in his truck and pulled around to the front of the Tesla, so Dean and Cas moved back to the shoulder and stood beside Dean’s car.

“Hey, so.” Dean leaned back against the closed door, hands in his pockets. His body was aimed towards Cas, but he looked to the side, to where Rufus worked on getting the Tesla settled. “If you wanna hitch a ride with Rufus, he can drop you at a decent motel. There’s even a car rental place nearby. Or, uh."

Dean chewed his lip, glanced at Cas, then away again. “At the risk of sounding creepy, I’ve got a house just outside Lawrence with a guest room. And I’ll be going in to KU tomorrow for classes, so I can give you a ride if you don't mind getting in a few hours early. Maybe show you the best place to get coffee in the morning?”

Cas stepped forward and Dean looked at him, eyes sparkling with the flashing lights of the tow truck. “If coffee is just coffee, I’d enjoy that. If coffee is more than just coffee...”

Dean tensed just enough to be noticeable, chest and shoulders leaning in towards Cas. Anticipatory, Cas thought.

Another few inches forward and they were nearly touching. “I’d enjoy that, too.”

* * *

Dean’s home turned out to be only a few minutes away from where Cas broke down, far enough into the suburbs that it sat on a plot large enough to also hold what looked like a workshop nearly as big as the house itself. Cas didn’t get a chance to study the interior in great detail, because the moment Dean closed the door he spun back around and dropped to his knees in front of Cas.

The way Cas had caressed Dean’s thigh and rubbed at his jeans just shy of the bulge the entire time Dean drove there had obviously left an impression.

Dean reached for Cas’s jeans, but stopped short before his fingers touched denim and looked up. “Is this okay?” he asked, almost selling Cas on the truth of his hesitation. But then he bit his lip, an intentional tease of the accidental way he’d grabbed Cas’s attention in the car, and not even his pearly teeth could hold back the impish grin that curled open the corners of his mouth.

In the light of the entryway, Cas could see the finer details of Dean’s face for the first time. Dark eyelashes framed green eyes, fluttering cheekily at him; freckles spread over his skin like stars across the cosmos. It was a gorgeous view, but Cas thought it would look even better with his fly open and Dean’s mouth stretched around him.

He put a hand on Dean’s head, gentle at first, then tried a light tug on the sandy brown hair when Dean leaned into the touch. Eyes fluttering closed, Dean let out a quiet but decidedly happy noise, so Cas gripped tighter. But Dean had made sure, and Cas should return the favor. Voice gentler than his hand, he asked, “Is _this_ okay?”

Dean nodded, then shivered when it pulled at his hair. “Yeah,” he said without further prompting. He opened his eyes to look up into Cas’s. “I like it even harder than that when I’ve got something in my mouth.”

Cas appreciated the unhesitant verbalization, rewarded it with a smile and permission. “Go on, then.”

In seconds, Dean had his pants and boxers partway down his thighs and a hand around his cock. Cas wasn’t all the way hard yet, but Dean sucked the tip of him into his mouth anyway as he worked the rest with his fist. He was generous with his tongue, sloppy with his spit to get his hand slicker, sliding more easily.

“Ah, fuck, that’s good.”

Dean moaned, whether from the praise or the sharp pain of his scalp as Cas gave his hair a harsh tug, Cas didn’t know. He knew that Dean’s lips should keep vibrating around him, though, so he did both again.

“You’re so good, Dean. You feel amazing.”

With another pleased groan, Dean started to lean in and take Cas further into his mouth, but Cas held him back with tight fingers in his hair.

“Not yet. Just like that, just keep licking. Fuck, your tongue. Circle around, then into—”

Words failed him as Dean preempted the command, the soft point of his tongue darting across the head of Cas’s cock, pressing against the particularly sensitive slit at its tip. Dean kept at it, pushing and easing off and pushing again, like he was trying to fuck his tongue right into Cas’s cock, until Cas gave another tug and ordered, “Back to licking.”

Dean alternated swirling his tongue all over Cas and toying with his slit, all while Cas talked him through it.

“Do you love it, Dean?” he asked, starting to feel shaky but fighting to keep his voice under control. He’d lost track of time, but it had been long enough that he was getting close and Dean’s knees had to hurt, not that he’d lost any of his enthusiasm.

Dean moaned an agreement, swiping the flat of his tongue hard over Cas as if to prove the point.

“Of course you do. Just look at you go. No one worships a cock this long, this well, without loving it. And Dean, you’re doing _so well._ But I want you to stop moving, just for a moment. Keep me in your mouth, that’s good. That’s perfect.”

He finally let go of his hold on Dean’s hair, fingers cramping from being kept tight so long, and stroked it instead as Dean’s eyes blinked open and focused on him.

“I’m going to tell you what I’d like to do, then I want you to tell me if you’d like that, too. Be honest, I promise I won’t be upset or disappointed. You’re amazing, I’ll be happy with anything you let me do. Do you understand?”

Dean nodded, bouncing Cas’s cock up and down with the movement of his head.

“I want you to keep doing what you’ve been doing,” Cas said. “Just the tip in your mouth, your hand on the rest. I want you to make me come like that. It won’t take much more; you’ve gotten me so close. But I want to fuck your mouth while I come. When it’s time, I want you to hold still and let me feed you my cock. I want to come down your throat.

“Would you like that, Dean?”

The way Dean whimpered and shook as Cas outlined his plan, he was certain he knew the answer. Still, he waited patiently as Dean pulled himself together and pulled his mouth off Cas’s cock long enough to say, “Oh, fuck, please. Please do that.”

Then Dean’s mouth was back around him, tongue and hand working with even more fervour to bring him to that promised edge. In no time at all, Cas felt the tight, hot coils of climax building and groaned out, “Dean, now.”

Dean’s hand dropped away and his tongue flattened against the bottom of his jaw just in time for Cas to push deeper into his mouth and come against his hard palate. Cas kept his thrusts shallow as he rode it out, sliding easily through the slick circle of Dean’s lips and over the cradle of his tongue.

He held himself inside after the final spurt, savoring the warmth and the way Dean let him stay there, but he had to withdraw before the sensation got to be too much. He tucked himself away and buttoned himself back up, eyes never leaving Dean’s, and only then said, “Lie back. Legs spread, knees up, feet flat on the floor.”

After holding the position for so long, Dean wobbled as he shifted his weight, but steadied himself before Cas had to catch him. Once he was in place, Cas followed him down, propping himself on one hand between Dean’s open thighs so he could tug down Dean’s zipper and free his cock from the confines of his clothes.

“Fu—” Dean choked out as Cas sucked him all the way down in one quick movement. The rest of the word disappeared into something like a scream when Cas hollowed his cheeks and swallowed around him; just like that, Cas felt the throbbing pulse and hot spurt of Dean’s orgasm.

Cas sucked him dry, then licked him clean for good measure. “That was incredibly hot,” he said when his mouth was free, just in case Dean worried about the performance. It was the truth—knowing he’d gotten Dean so worked up was almost enough to get Cas going again, but he wasn’t that young anymore.

“You’re... Fuck.” Dean tried to lift his head, but it fell back against the floor. “Jesus, I think you broke me.”

Pushing to his feet, Cas grinned down at Dean. “I’m very sorry. I’ll never do it again.”

“Hey, what? No!” A little shaky, Dean’s finger shot up to point in his general direction. “No, that was not a complaint and any time you want to do it again, fuck, you know where I live.” Dean’s hand dropped to the floor and he added, after a pause, “Any time after like the next hour, I mean.”

* * *

Cas had plugged his phone in before showering, so while Dean washed up, he called his brother’s house. It was late enough that it had rolled around to early, but Jimmy had insisted that he wanted a call when Cas arrived. Cas had, more or less, arrived.

Claire answered, despite it being a school night, and was unsympathetically delighted by the story of his misadventure. He could hardly hold it against her, given how happy he was now that it had happened.

“See, if you believed in karma, you’d know this happened because you refused to take me along,” she told him.

“But I don’t, and you have to go to school. In a few hours. Give your dad the phone and go to sleep. I love you.”

She sighed and started to argue, but a yawn cut her off before she could get more than a few words out. “All right, all right. Love you too, nerd.”

Jimmy was less amused.

“Cas, you could’ve been hurt! This is why you should let Hannah take care of things for you, it’s literally her job. And this guy! You have no idea who he is, he has your car—”

“Jimmy,” Cas interrupted. “He’s a professor at KU. They have a picture of him on the engineering page, you can look him up. I’m perfectly safe.”

“You didn’t know that when you got in a car with him,” Jimmy muttered, but he sounded slightly mollified that Cas had checked that. “Do you need me to find you a hotel? How are you getting to your talk?”

“It’s fine, Dean’s offered to give me a ride.”

“Look, I’m sure Hannah can hire someone—”

“No, James.” Full names meant serious talk, so Jimmy stopped trying to come up with reasons for Cas to leave and listened. “I don’t think you heard me. Dean has offered to _give me a ride_.”

Jimmy’s offended splutter of understanding was drowned out by his daughter’s delighted whoops. “Get it, Uncle Nerd!” She must have picked up the other phone at some point during the conversation.

“Castiel,” Jimmy sighed.

Cas snorted at him. “She’s a sixteen-year-old girl, she knows about sex.”

“She doesn’t and she never will. She’s joining a convent tomorrow.”

“If you think that’ll work, you’ve forgotten Sunday school.”

“What?”

“Sister Maribel and Sister Jane.”

Claire cackled again. “No way! You didn’t tell me there were lesbian nuns. Sign me up for monastic life!”

Jimmy yelled for Claire to go to bed, but the laughter in his voice belied the volume. “And Cas... Good luck with your bad choices, I guess. Claire will be very upset if you get murdered by a groupie.”

“Only until she gets all my money.” More seriously, he said, “He’s not a groupie. A fan, yes, but not obsessive. He’s accomplished in his own field, and he talks to me like we’re both real people. He’s a good man.”

“Oh god. You’ve slept with him already.” Jimmy waited for Cas to deny it, and groaned when he didn’t. “Cas, I know it’s been a while, but you don’t have to—”

Bristling, Cas snapped, “Right. I don’t have to. I wanted to, and I did, and I enjoyed it so much that I want to do it again. Any other concerns?”

“No.” Jimmy’s voice was softer, apologetic. “You’re right, you’re right. I worry—but that’s my problem, not yours. I’m glad you’re safe, and it sounds like Dean was a great help. I’m sorry, Cas.”

The sound of the shower cut out, and Cas forced himself to stand down. They both had their reasons for it being a sensitive topic, but Cas didn’t want to argue about it anymore. “It’s okay, but I should go. Love.”

“Love.”

It was all they needed to say, shorthand they’d used as kids and never grown out of. The reminder of their childhood was enough to wash away the last of his annoyance and he hung up feeling fond, just as Dean opened the bathroom door. One hand holding a towel draped low over his hips, he walked up to stand in the doorway to the guest room.

“So,” he said, just like he had on the side of the highway. “You’re welcome to stay in there, sheets are fresh and everything. But, uh. I got a king bed, just in case you’re interested.”

Cas grinned. “In coffee?”

“Yeah, jackass.” Dean dropped the towel and it fluttered to the floor. Turning away, he called over his shoulder, “In coffee.”


	2. Arcturus

“—heat of the moment! Telling you what your—”

Dean stretched out a hand and snoozed his phone alarm without looking. Most of his body was trapped under a warm, solid weight draped across his back, which was really his favorite way to wake up. He shifted slowly, languidly, just enough to enjoy the press of another body against his without disturbing his companion, and let himself drift in the memories of the night before.

His eyes snapped open.

He’d called Castiel Novak a jackass.

He’d met Castiel Novak, taken him home, spent what felt like three hours on his dick, then _called him a jackass_. And it had, by some magic combination of mindblowing sex and flirtation and appreciation of his sass (and his bare ass?) actually worked to get Castiel Novak in his bed.

Castiel Novak was in his bed.

Was it weird to still think of him as _Castiel Novak_? It was, after all, the morning after. Following that sort of intimacy, he could probably drop some of the formality. But maybe not? He hadn’t invited Dean to call him anything else (though the familiar, approving way he’d said _Dean’s_ name, holy shit).

Gunner Lawless had told Dean to call him Gunner after about five minutes of Dean stammering “Mr. Lawless” at him at a meet-and-greet Sam had gifted him for his birthday one year. There hadn’t even been an exchange of fluids that time, not that Dean would’ve been opposed to choking on Gunner’s dick. But given the choice, Castiel Novak was definitely number one on his list.

He just didn’t know the etiquette.

He’d never had sex with a real live famous person before. So he’d never had a morning after with someone who existed in his head as a full name. But even in Dean’s head, shortening it to _Castiel_ felt weird. So Castiel Novak it was.

Castiel Novak, in his bed.

That thought looped and skipped in his mind to the exclusion of everything else, and he let it. He went ahead and repeated it over and over, _Castiel Novak in his bed,_ because he was having a definite moment.

He’d had an intellectual crush on the scientist since halfway through the second chapter of _We Are Stardust_.

Sam had told him he had to read it, which he’d ignored because Sam had horrible taste in pop-sci media. But then Charlie had literally shoved her copy in his face and ordered, “Read,” so Dean had read. Charlie didn’t get caught up in the feel-good bullshit pseudoscience crazes that got Sam excited, so he trusted her judgment.

The first chapter was all right, but nothing spectacular. A pretty typical, dumbed-down-for-laymen explanation of the big bang and nuclear fusion. Then he got to the second chapter, “This Does Not Make Us Special,” and after that Dean was a goner.

And when he finished the book, and saw the little biography blurb with a picture of a man hotter than an uncooled engine? Well, it wasn’t just intellectual after that. Dean may have gone a little overboard trying to find more about Castiel Novak. There wasn’t much; it was before he really became known, and the internet was just on the cusp of being a thing. All Dean could find was what had been in the bio already:

He’d done his undergraduate at the University of Illinois, and graduate degrees—both a Masters and a PhD—at the University of Chicago. He live in an unspecified Chicago suburb (which was enough information, Dean wasn’t trying to _stalk_ him) and worked at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

That was it. Nothing personal, nothing especially interesting. Dean probably would’ve moved on from his (at the time) very minor celebrity infatuation if things had ended there. But then Castiel Novak had gone and started hosting a science show on PBS. Then he kept making more TV appearances, and was a sassy fucker on them ( _“I just think it’s such a beautiful sentiment: We Are Stardust.” “I suppose. But then, so is dog crap.”_ ), and came out (which Dean knew didn’t _really_ mean he had a chance, but a man could dream), and didn’t take anyone’s shit about anything.

So yeah, maybe it made sense—utter impossibility of Dean’s fanboy fantasies coming true aside—that flashing his ass and calling the man a jackass was an effective method of seduction.

Not that they’d actually done anything once they got to the bed. The spirit but the flesh, etc. Dean was closer to forty than twenty, as evidenced by his complaining knees. Worth it, though. So very fucking worth it.

That happy and detailed reminiscence (the weight in his hand; the warm, salty tang on his tongue; the praise that went straight to his dick but also heated his chest) was interrupted by the resurgence of his alarm. This time when he shut it off, a soft laugh huffed against his shoulder and stubble rasped across his skin. It made his nerves tingle delightfully. All over.

“Asia, really?”

Dean snorted, shoved his weight around until he could roll on his side. “It gets me up,” he defended, but with a smile; he was pretty sure he was being teased. “Good morning to you, too, Dr. Novak.”

That earned him another laugh, and though he missed the electric feel of it moving against him, watching Castiel Novak’s crinkling eyes and parting lips was hardly a consolation prize.

“Firstly, you can call me Cas. I think we’re sufficiently well introduced to be on a first-name basis here, _Professor Winchester_.”

If that was an attempt to prove his point, it was a bad one. It just gave Dean all sorts of ideas, the kind where maybe he’d fallen behind on his latest project and his new department chair called him in to read him the riot act. But he’d been distracted because he couldn’t stop thinking about his boss, so coming into his office late in the evening when the man’s tie was loose and his hair was a mess—

And maybe Dean watched a little too much porn. That wasn’t usually a problem, but pretty unnecessary to get caught up in fantasy when he was actually _living_ one. (The one where Castiel Novak was in his bed, naked and grinning at him.)

“Secondly,” Castiel Novak, _call him Cas_ , said, “if that song is what gets you up...”

Then his forehead crinkled up, followed by scrunching down as his eyebrows furrowed, and he shook his head with a wry smile.

“No, I’ve lost it. Or I never had it to begin with. But I’m sure it would have been equal parts clever and suggestive.”

“Oh, absolutely.” Dean tried not to laugh, he really did, but an errant chuckle escaped when he added, “And I would definitely have been charmed by your brand-new, never-before-heard pun about morning wood.”

Between the morning hair, the pillow line creasing his cheek, and the way his mouth kept twitching like it wanted to smile, Cas’s glower didn’t have a whole lot of force behind it. “Are we going to compare originality of pickup lines, really? _I can show you where to get coffee._ ”

“Hey now!” Propping himself up on his elbow, Dean extended the first finger of his other hand to make a point. “A, it totally worked.” A second finger. “B, you just have to impress the guy you’re already in bed with. I was hitting on Castiel fucking Novak. All this,” he waved his fingers around Cas’s face, “and I still managed to come up with a line, even if it was a bad one. What’s your excu–use...”

Cas’s lips curled around Dean’s pointed fingers, drawing them into his mouth to be licked and sucked and nibbled until Dean lost his train of thought entirely.

Once Dean’s words were reduced to a little whimper, Cas pulled off and licked his lips. “My excuse is that I’m already in bed with a very attractive man. Also, I have it on good authority that my personality is at least half coffee. Despite promises being made, I haven’t had any.”

It wasn’t exactly news that Cas found him attractive; he was, once again, _in Dean’s bed._ But he still warmed at the compliment, rolling over to grab his phone and check the time. And if it happened to hide the blush creeping down his chest, that was just a bonus.

“I really do want to take you to this little cafe near campus, but I can put on a pot if you need to pregame. We’ve got time.”

Cas followed him over, molding to his back and sliding a hand over the raised curve of his hip. He made a pleased hum into Dean’s shoulder when his fingertips brushed the base of Dean’s dick. Not like it was a surprise, though—Cas had been draped all over him, not to mention pretty much giving his fingers a blowjob. So the morning wood line wouldn’t have been entirely out of place. Judging by what he felt pressing against him, Cas had a bit of a situation going on, too.

“Mm, how much time?”

“Enough,” Dean gasped as Cas’s hand closed around him. “Definitely enough.”

Cas toyed with him, easy and lazy to start. His fingers loose and the crease of his first knuckles cradling the sensitive underside of Dean’s dick, he jerked Dean slowly as he sucked bruises in a line across the back of Dean’s shoulder. Something about the gentle, deep pain combined with the gradually escalating pleasure felt too intimate, too intense for the morning moment that it was.

“Oh fuck, oh please.” He didn’t care that it was too soon. He couldn’t be improving Cas’s impression of his stamina after the night before, but it was so goddamn good he couldn’t help it. He wanted it to last forever, but he wanted to come even more. “Harder on the...” He wiggled his hips a little to get his point across, but ended up saying, “On the everything, fuck, Cas.”

The hickey near his shoulder blade turned into a bite and Cas groaned into his skin. He obliged, tightening his grip and speeding up his strokes, but he also pushed his own dick against Dean’s ass, hard and hot and sticky with precome. Not along his crack, just rubbing against the flesh and muscle of one cheek. Something that could’ve been a curse or a moan curled out from between Cas’s clenched teeth with his next breath.

A few more moments and Dean was shuddering into it, coming onto the sheet as Cas kept jerking and humping him until the last shaky stutter of his hips. Then Cas was on top of him, pushing him down flat on the bed and throwing a leg over his thigh so that Cas had leverage to fuck him into the mattress without actually fucking him, thrusting and grinding against Dean’s ass and—fuck.

Just, fuck. Dean’s orgasm was too recent for his dick to get anything but tenderness out of humping the mattress beneath him, but he was tempted to do it anyway just to see what sort of reaction he’d earn from Cas. But he didn’t make up his mind quickly enough, because soon Cas’s movements turned rapid and jerky as he got himself off all over the curve of Dean’s ass and the small of his back.

* * *

Dean didn’t end up making that pot of coffee, but they left the house with enough time to stop by Jojo’s Joe after parking. The line was nearly out the door, just like it always was weekday mornings, but Kevin waved him to the front where his drink was already waiting.

He’d taught Kevin the previous semester, a prodigy two years younger than his peers in Dean’s Intro to Mechanical Design class. Kid was bright, if a little nervous, and did well despite being pre-law and not taking any other engineering courses.

“Cinnamon latte all ready to go, Professoholyshit.”

The range of expressions that crossed Kevin’s face was pretty comical, but by the time it ended Dean wasn’t sure he was still breathing. “All right there, Kev?”

Eyes wide, Kevin leaned forward over the counter and waited for Dean to lean in, too. “Castiel Novak is here. He just walked in the door. What do I do.” Poor Kevin was clearly trying to keep his voice down, but subtle volume went out the window with the rest of his cool.

The cafe fell silent, but all of Kevin’s intense, panicked attention was on Dean. He looked absolutely heartbroken when Dean cracked up at him. It wasn’t very nice, and he understood Kevin’s starstruck awe as well as anyone, but his morning just kept getting more ridiculously surreal with each new event. How that was possible after waking up to what he had, Dean had no idea.

He stopped laughing when Cas spoke from right behind him; not touching, but close enough to set his neck rippling with goosebumps. “I think you should make him coffee.”

Cas reached past Dean and snagged the paper cup marked “Prof W.” The grunting noise he made when he took a sip didn’t sound anything like the ones Dean had heard from him previously. “Not this. Red eye. Sixteen ounce. This is an abomination.”

He didn’t put it back down, though. When Dean glanced away from Kevin’s slack-jawed stare, he saw Cas still drinking _his_ “abomination” of a latte. After a moment, and another swallow that looked like it drained half the cup, Cas noticed Kevin’s stillness. He frowned.

“Red eye,” he repeated. “Or, uh, a shot in the dark? Drip coffee, a shot of espresso...” He turned to Dean. “Do you call it something strange here?”

Stealing his coffee back, Dean said, “The only thing strange here is you. This ain’t Chicago. Ask nicely or Kevin won’t make you any coffee at all.”

“Yes I will!” Kevin squeaked, though he still didn’t show any signs of movement other than his eyes darting back and forth between the two of them.

“Yeah, no.” While Kevin had been stunned, the other barista, Krissy, had pulled together Cas’s drink and plunked it in front of him. “On the house if you stop holding up my line.” She flashed them a viciously insincere smile and Dean regretted, not for the first time, that she’d never taken one of his classes. He liked the little spitfire.

“You heard her, Cas,” he said, taking a bit of shameless delight in the way the nickname made Kevin twitch. “I think we’ve outstayed our welcome.”

Not to be hurried, Cas picked up the new cup and tested the coffee, and _that_ was more like the moans Dean would be thinking about for years to come. He gulped his coffee to excuse, if not hide, the blush he felt coming on. Cas nodded his approval—redundant, but at least less likely to make Dean embarrass himself in front of everyone at the coffee shop—and extracted a fifty from his pocket to drop into the tip jar.

The crowd parted when Cas turned and walked out, Dean following behind and shaking his head.

“You’re kind of an asshole,” Dean pointed out as they walked away from the door. He smiled as it said it, though, and even he could hear it coloring his tone.

Cas stopped at the corner to look to Dean for direction. “I thought I was a jackass.”

“You are a jackass. Doesn’t mean you can’t also be an asshole. How is this not common knowledge? So many people would get over their celebrity crushes. You must have a fantastic fucking publicist.”

“Oh, is that why Hannah doesn’t let me talk to people?” Cas walked next to him, sounding nonchalant about both the accusation and the not insignificant number of people who paused to stare at them while running to classes. “I had no idea anyone might find me abrasive.”

Dean just had to grin at him. “So she does call you on your bullshit.”

“Some. I’ve also been called an asshole on national television more than once, so I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that people don’t know this about me. But most importantly,” he said with a wry look at Dean, “I have a sixteen-year-old niece.”

“Of course. Isn’t family great?”

They traded stories, mostly about Dean’s younger brother Sam versus Cas’s identical twin Jimmy, for the rest of the way to Dean’s office.

Dean had known Castiel Novak had a twin, though he wasn’t sure from where. It was probably mentioned in some interview sometime? But he hadn’t stopped to think about it since getting up close and oh-so-personal with Cas. Suddenly he connected those two things, and his mind very nearly exploded with the possibilities. He had to cut himself off mid-sentence to choke down a sip of his latte and restart his brain.

Of course he’d had twin fantasies before. Everyone had twin fantasies. The thing was, when he pictured a second Cas, it was literally a second Cas. Snarky and smart as hell, courageous and argumentative and just the right kind of bossy, scorchingly good in bed. He didn’t know if he could handle more than one of them, and on top of that, it didn’t sound like Jimmy was really all that similar to his brother, personality-wise.

And Cas’s personality, whether or not it was half coffee, was a huge part of Dean’s attraction to him. So he could live without daydreaming about being the filling in a Cas sandwich, at least as long as Cas himself was there. Once he went back home, all bets were off on daydreams.

So Dean swallowed his coffee and resumed listening to Cas talk about his brother’s embarrassing first communion. Cas grinned at him when his attention returned, but if he’d noticed Dean’s distraction or guessed the source of it, he didn’t comment.

It didn’t take long to reach Dean’s building.

“Well, this is it.”

With a wave of his hand, Dean showed off his office. It wasn’t as much of a mess as usual, a miracle mostly owed to the fact that he’d cleared space for grading midterm papers and had just finished returning them. It fit his desk with a chair on either side, and not a lot else. That was fine, since he only used it for office hours and grading—all his projects lived in his workshop at home—but it probably didn’t impress a guy who’d done guest lectures at Ivy League schools.

Cas looked around with interest, though, gravitating to the one bookshelf Dean had room for and studying it closely. The top shelf was all family pictures: a couple of Dean’s parents; one of Sammy’s grade school pictures that he hated, and a picture of the two of them as kids, then a series of gorgeous photos from his wedding; Rufus, Bobby, and Ellen in front of their house, and a separate one of Jo that she’d sent from... He wasn’t actually sure where, probably Europe somewhere judging by the castle in the background.

Despite looking at the photos at length, not trying to hide his snooping, Cas didn’t ask about them. Not even when he lingered on the one that pretty clearly indicated a romantic relationship between the man Dean had introduced as his uncle and both of the other two in the picture with him. He hadn’t thought that the Rufus-Bobby-Ellen triangle would be an issue, but it was nice to have that confirmed. Astronomically hot or not, anyone who had a problem with Dean’s family wouldn’t be getting any more blowjobs.

Cas moved on to the books, and quickly located the chunk taken up by his own works. They were on the first shelf that wasn’t full of pictures, all in a row chronologically, and that was probably pretty telling. Sure enough, when he pulled _Our Nearest Neighbors: Proxima Centauri to the Galactic Halo_ off to flip through the first few pages, he slanted a smirk at Dean.

“Good thing knowing I’m an asshole gets rid of silly celebrity crushes.”

“Hey, fuck you.”

“Maybe later.” Cas shot him a simmering look that promised it wasn’t just idle banter. “Don’t you have class?”

Swivelling to look at the clock by his desk, Dean swore. He did have class, and it had started three minutes ago. “Shit, yeah, I gotta go. Sorry. You can, uh, hang out here, or wander around or whatever, I don’t know if you need to meet someone at some point? I’ll be done in like an hour and a half.”

“Oh, I don’t mind.” Cas replaced the book. “I’ll just sit in on your class.”

“What, really? I mean, it’s just a mid-level undergrad course on combustion engines. Not, you know...” He gestured at the series of Cas’s volumes. “Rocket science.”

“It’s closer than what I do, if that’s what you’re suggesting.” Cas stepped in closer, barely a foot away from Dean, and looked him over. “I won’t go if it makes you uncomfortable, but don’t think I’d be bored. I like seeing you get... enthusiastic about your passions, Dean.”

“Fuck. You can come, all right, but you sit in the back and you don’t try to give me a boner in front of fifty engineering students.”

Cas backed off with a small smile that Dean didn’t trust at all. “Of course. I’ll be on my best behavior. Until I stay after class to talk with you personally, of course, Professor Winchester.”

Castiel Novak was going to be the death of him. But what a way to go.


	3. Betelgeuse

The hallways of the building Dean led him to were surprisingly deserted. Though Dean’s class period had started, Cas expected there would be students lingering before or after other classes, sitting on the ground with homework spread around him, or chatting with groups of friends in the most inconvenient corners. That was what he was accustomed to, both in his own college days and whenever he visited a new campus.

“Is it always this empty?”

Dean shrugged without slowing his pace, which was hurried but trying to look calm about it. Only because he felt a little guilty about being responsible for Dean’s lateness, Cas didn’t give him a hard time about how it wasn’t working. He was obviously flustered. Maybe it was also a little bit because he liked seeing Dean flustered, and since there was no one else around to see it, it wasn’t like Dean was at risk of embarrassing himself in front of students or colleagues.

“Sometimes if Devereaux gets bored—he’s a poli sci prof—he’ll come through and rant at everyone until they clear out. Not quite sure why, other than that he’s a weird and ornery dude, but students have learned it’s better not to loiter when he has office hours.”

From half a step behind he couldn’t see Dean’s mouth, which really was too bad, but it sounded like there was a smile forming Dean’s words.

“Weird and ornery,” Cas repeated. “Do you have a type, Dean?”

That stopped Dean in his tracks, late for class or no, and he spun to gape at Cas. “What, Frank? No, ugh, he’s—just no. Why would you say that?”

“You sounded fond of him, despite only saying objectively negative things about him and his behavior. And I have it on very good authority,” he added with a smirk, voice low and intimate, “that you’ve been known to go for ‘weird, ornery dudes’ before.”

Dean pushed him back with a hand spread at the center of his chest; not hard, but enough for Cas to notice what he hadn’t realized before, that he’d closed the distance between them again without conscious thought.

“Behave,” Dean admonished, although he was grinning and a blush pinkened his cheeks below the freckles. “I am fond of Frank, but not like that. He’s a friend of my uncle’s.”

Tempting as it was to take Dean’s mild rebuke as a challenge, Cas had pushed him far enough for one morning. He had a great deal of fun doing it, and Dean gave every indication that he enjoyed it, too, but he could also respect that Dean had a job to do.

So instead of teasing him more, he nodded down the hall to nudge Dean back into movement and asked, “Of Rufus’s?”

“No. Well, yes, but secondarily. He was Bobby’s friend first. Bobby’s the other guy in that photo you saw, the one in the wheelchair. Now there’s a world champion in ornery, let me tell you. Cantankerous, even.”

Stopping, Dean peeked through the window in the door to a classroom, then pulled back out of sight and grimaced. “Of course this couldn’t be the day when everyone skips class. They’re all there, all antsy because I’m late. If I walk in there with you, nothing productive’s gonna happen today.”

Dean worried his lower lip between his teeth and glanced over at Cas. “I hate to ask,” he started.

Hot instinct told Cas he wasn’t prepared to say no to whatever Dean was about to ask of him, not when he was looking so shy and sultry all at once, so he preempted it. “I really can entertain myself for an hour. Or a few; I’ve imposed on your time enough already.”

Dean’s expression flashed confusion, then hurt, then he pasted on a grin that was a pale imitation of the smiles he’d offered Cas earlier. “Right, of course. You’ve got better things to do. I’ll just—”

“Dean.”

Cas didn’t roll his eyes or call Dean an idiot, but it was a near thing. It was how he would have treated anyone else being so ridiculously self-deprecating. In fact, he had done so with Claire during her awkward middle school years, but he and Claire had a very special, lovingly adversarial relationship. Dean didn’t know him particularly well, though, and would probably take it at face value.

“It’s not a matter of having better things to do. I asked to sit in, remember? I’d much rather watch you teach than look around campus or call Hannah, though she’d insist the latter is the most important thing for me to do right now.

“But I also told you I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, and I meant it. Since you seemed worried about my presence disrupting your class, I thought I’d offer a solution.”

“Oh.” Dean looked an endearing combination of sheepish and pleased. “That’s, uh. I was just gonna ask if you’d mind going in the back door.”

Cas stared at him.

It took Dean a minute to react, but his confused frown turned into a poorly stifled snicker when the apparently unintentional innuendo of his words hit him. Cas liked to think it was subconscious at the very least; once he was allowed to tease Dean again, he’d make sure Dean knew that he definitely wouldn’t mind. He’d been rather fixated on the idea since the morning, when he’d... knocked on the back door.

Dean bit his lip again, this time clearly suppressing a smile, and nudged Cas’s shoulder with his own. “Shut up. There’s usually an empty seat in the back corner there. Just go sit down and try not to give me or any of my students an aneurysm.”

In the hubbub caused by Dean’s entrance, Cas managed to slip in the other door mostly unnoticed, just as Dean requested. One student did turn to look, though, and did a double-take at the sight of him. He should have known; if he’d picked an english or sociology course to audit (which only would’ve happened had Dean been an english or sociology professor), he might’ve had a chance to go incognito. A room of Dean’s students, on the other hand, was bound to be full of people just as nerdy as Dean was.

Not that Cas had any room to judge nerdiness, or any desire to. It just made it more difficult to honor Dean’s request not to make a scene.

“Are you—” the kid started, fortunately sotto voce enough that it didn’t disturb anyone else.

Cas didn’t even bother fixing him with a glare, just kept his eyes focused on the front of the room as he growled, “Shut up and listen to Professor Winchester.”

The kid jerked his head around to face forward. Cas smiled to himself. But only a few seconds later, the student slipped a hand into his pocket and snuck his phone into his lap, hidden under the half-desk attached to his chair. Rolling his eyes, Cas kicked the back of his seat just forcefully enough to earn a startled twitch.

“I said listen.”

The phone vanished.

* * *

Halfway through the class, Cas’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it. Everyone who had his number knew he kept the volume off and they shouldn’t expect him to answer immediately. Of that already limited number, it was bound to be one of three people; and they could all wait.

Hannah would be calling because she was worried about his talk, his car, or his life. It all depended on how much information Jimmy had passed along to her, because he himself, Cas realized, hadn’t contacted her at all since leaving Illinois. If she didn’t know whether or not he was alive at all, she’d call Jimmy after he didn’t answer. If it was anything else, another thirty minutes wouldn’t kill her.

Otherwise, it was family. Jimmy’s inevitable lecture might grow in length and intensity from being put off, but even at its mildest offered a much less interesting prospect than watching Dean. And though he’d be more inclined to chat with Claire than his brother in other circumstances, it wasn’t worth stepping away from Dean’s teaching.

Dean interested him more than ever when he was in his element; Cas hadn’t been wrong in guessing that he got passionate about his subject. He lit up in front of the whiteboard, the pen circling in his hand to accentuate his movements even when he wasn’t sketching pistons and crankshafts.

Early in the class, he’d engaged the students in a debate about inline versus radial engines in World War II planes. Since then he’d mostly progressed to egging them on as they argued back and forth with each other, but he still jumped in when they fell just short of grasping a conclusion, or to offer another point of view they hadn’t considered.

Cas’s phone stopped vibrating at him, but immediately started back up with another call. He pulled it out and checked the screen—Hannah—and sent it straight to voicemail. She’d know the difference, she counted how many times it rang, so that would tell her what she hadn’t picked up on the first time: he actively didn’t wish to speak to her.

Instead, a text flashed at him before he could put it away: **Answer your damn phone Castiel**.

He still didn’t want to leave Dean’s class—didn’t want to leave Dean’s presence in general, especially when he was so engaging—but Hannah so rarely resorted to profanity that something might actually be wrong. Standing drew Dean’s attention, and Cas waved his flashing phone with an apologetic grimace before ducking out.

He answered in the hallway. “Hannah? What’s going on?”

“I was hoping you could tell me that, Cas.” Her tone, clipped and precise, was as close as she ever let herself get to yelling. “I had to hear from Jimmy that your car broke down and you got picked up on the side of the road by a KU faculty member who may or may not be planning to wear your skin as a suit.”

That was it, really? Cas blew out a breath. “I told him I was fine. You know he worries.”

“Yes, well, one of you had to get the brains,” she snapped. “I would’ve been worried too, if my Twitter alerts hadn’t blown up to reassure me that you were alive and well and terrorizing baristas.”

“No one was terrorized.”

“There are _pictures_. The sixteen-year-old at the counter looks ready to swoon.”

“He’s not sixteen, he was one of Dean’s students.”

“Oh yes,” Hannah said heavily, “Dean. Dean Winchester, professor of mechanical engineering. It’s true, most of the internet is much more interested in how cozy you look with him, because I have to say, there doesn’t seem to be any room between your bodies in the most popular picture. And then you crashed his class—”

“How could that possibly have spread already? The hallway was empty. No one even saw me.”

“Except for ‘engineerdudebro,’ apparently. He’s delighted that _the_ Castiel Novak told him to shut up.”

Cas should’ve kicked him harder. “I also told him to pay attention, not fuck around on Twitter. Did he mention that?”

Hannah laughed at his displeasure. It wasn’t the friendly laugh of a shared joke; she was mocking him. As if to confirm it, she said, “You’re such a grumpy old man sometimes, I swear. Do you forget that everyone is connected all the time, or do you just not care about how you come off to the public?

“No,” she interrupted before he could answer, “I know, stupid question. You don’t care, but that’s what you pay me for.”

“This wouldn’t be a problem if you let me manage my own social media accounts.”

That got him another not-entirely-kind snort. “You on social media wouldn’t be a problem, it would be a disaster. You’d get into tweet wars with every flat-Earther, creationist, and anti-vaxxer on the internet.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“I say that like the person who has to deal with the death threats you already get.” She sighed. “Just be careful, Cas. As a favor to me, if nothing else. Jimmy’s not the only one who worries.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

It wasn’t a promise to behave; Cas believed in keeping his promises, and that one was unrealistic. Life was too short and people were too ignorant for Cas to waste time censoring himself. He wanted to educate people, to inspire them to learn like he’d been inspired, and yes, being in the public eye was the best way to accomplish that. But he refused to compromise his identity for it.

Even if that identity was mostly a jackass.

“All right.” Hannah sighed again, but at least she didn’t sound upset anymore. “I’ll see you in here at least an hour before we start, right?”

“Of course.”

A pause, then, “Will I see Professor Winchester in here, too?”

“Maybe. If you do, don’t call him that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want the memory of you saying it to ruin the mood later.”

He thought he heard her choking down a laugh before she hung up on him, but he couldn’t be sure.

Missing the rest of Dean’s class rankled him, but he didn’t want to cause a distraction yet again, so he threw himself back into the days of undergrad and sat himself down on the floor, his back against a wall, to wait. Being that he was far from being an undergrad anymore, it didn’t prove quite as easy or comfortable as he remembered it.

Also new since his time at UIC: the smartphone. Hannah might not allow him to control his own name on Twitter, or a handful of other ‘important’ sites—and when he wasn’t feeling belligerent about it, he appreciated not having to worry about all that bullshit—but he still knew how to use them.

Browsing social media as he waited for Dean to finish, it didn’t take long to find that Hannah had been right. His morning coffee with Dean was trending, because people lived ridiculously inane lives and had nothing better to do than argue with strangers over the internet about what two entirely different strangers might be doing with each other.

Reading through thread after thread of discussion that was split pretty evenly between religious condemnation and explicitly erotic fantasy, Cas toyed with the idea of posting the truth from some harmlessly anonymous account that no one would believe. It wouldn’t even be as graphic as some of the suggestions already in the mix. He also noticed that Dean had been identified from the very start, because it was his campus and the students knew him.

When it was just his reputation at stake, he couldn’t give any less of a fuck. But it hadn’t occurred to him until that moment that Dean would be affected, too.

Cas was, as he was increasingly having to come to terms with, some degree of celebrity. He didn’t have to deal with the consequences of it too often, between Hannah’s exceptionally professional interference and his own tendency to be a hermit, but he was at least theoretically aware of the existence of those consequences.

Dean, on the other hand, hadn’t really made to choice to accept those risks. He was an accomplished academic, but not a famous one. It had probably never occurred to him what could come of taking Cas for coffee, in either the literal or the figurative sense; it hadn’t occurred to Cas, after all, and he was supposed to be prepared for things like that.

Maybe it was for the best that Hannah didn’t even tell him the passwords for his accounts. He probably would’ve given in to the temptation to post something inappropriate and shocking if he’d been able to do it as himself, and he wouldn’t have stopped to think about what effect that would have on Dean’s life.

During their fight about Cas’s coming out, Jimmy had accused him of “delighting in conflict for its own sake” and not caring what it did to the people around him. That hit hard because it was, in part, the truth. He _did_ seek out conflict, not because he enjoyed it but because when he saw something was unjust or incorrect, he needed to fix it.

And then, yes; he enjoyed the resulting conflict.

He liked arguing, no doubt about it, and not just in the detached, theoretical way popular in academia. He didn’t pull his punches when someone was being obtuse, whether it was deliberate or not. Dry sarcasm fueled most of his interactions even when he wasn’t being confrontational; when he was, he just got sharper.

It had blown back on Jimmy more than once. Now, if he let his impulses get away from him, it would do the same to Dean. Not just Dean, either. His family had to have heard the news already, unless they all lived under separate rocks, and they might be subject to unwanted attention from it. His parents, his brother, his uncles and—aunt, Cas had to assume; whatever was going on between those three was none of his business, but it seemed like an interesting story. They all risked exposure because Cas had been carelessly intimate.

Trying to quiet the guilty spiral of thoughts was useless when he couldn’t objectively judge their validity, so he turned to his usual resource for neutral assessment. He called Jimmy.

“Accounts, this is James.”

“Have you and Amelia ever been threatened because of me?”

His twin met the unsolicited question with a long silence, then a sigh. “You know, some of us work regular hours. Even when our brothers are stirring up speculation about their sexual exploits. And now you’ve made me say ‘sexual exploits’ at work. Twice.”

“Jimmy—”

“Cas.” Jimmy’s voice softened. “No. We’ve never been in any danger, no matter how much of an asshole you’ve been to popular and influential people on TV. The worst that’s ever happened is someone mistaking me for you in the grocery store and trying to argue about God a bit. He wasn’t even particularly rude about it.”

Not realizing how tense he’d been, Cas slumped against the wall. If his own family was safe, it seemed more likely that Dean’s was, too. Just to be sure, he pressed, “You’d tell me.”

“I would’ve told you before now if it had happened, which you know perfectly well. Or you would, if you weren’t freaking out.”

Knowing he was being contrary just so that Jimmy would call him out on it, Cas muttered, “I’m not freaking out.” He knew he was, or had been; just talking to Jimmy had started resetting his thought processes to their usual steadiness.

Jimmy knew it, too. “Yeah, right. I’m sure this question came out of a perfectly logical train of thought that has nothing to do with you and your hookup being all over each other, all over everyone’s feeds.”

“How come I always get the grief for being a jackass?” Cas asked with a laugh. “You’re just as much of an asshole.”

He could hear Jimmy’s responding grin in the words, “Only to you. But that is what this is about, right?”

Cas stared at the closed door leading to the front of the class where Dean was. “He doesn’t know yet, unless someone interrupted his class with it in the past twenty minutes. I don’t know how he’s going to react.”

The truth was, he didn’t know Dean well enough to predict what would happen. He barely knew Dean at all, really, he’d met the man less than twelve hours ago. But Cas, who never cared what anyone thought of him, worried that Dean would be angry. He could’ve told himself that it was because his luggage was still at Dean’s house and his car was still at Dean’s uncle’s tow yard, but he tried not to lie in his internal narration multiple times in one day.

“I don’t want this to end,” he admitted into the silence. Jimmy always knew when to give him time. “I don’t know what it is yet, beyond sex, but it feels like it could be more than that. Don’t get me wrong, the sexual chemistry is phenom—”

“I’ll hang up on you,” Jimmy interrupted loudly. “Have a sincere conversation without seeking refuge in snark for once in your life, Cas. You can do it, I believe in you.”

Snorting, Cas pointed out, “That would probably have been more effective without the snark on your end.”

But Jimmy was right, too. This was important. It had been years since he’d felt such a strong personal connection to someone, though sexual attraction was common for him. With Dean, it came quickly and easily; spending time with him felt natural, opposite in every way from how he usually found strangers or even acquaintances a chore.

For all Dean had started as a fan, he wasn’t starstruck past the initial meeting. He seemed to genuinely like Cas as a person, which was a scarce enough quality that it seemed to be mostly genetic among the Novaks, and he gave back as good as he got from Cas, which was even more rare. He’d called Cas a jackass like it was nothing, with a devilishly handsome smirk and a fantastic view of his bare ass.

“I like him.” Sure, he could have a sincere conversation with his ass going numb on the hallway’s dirty linoleum floor. “Everything was going well, but now suddenly I’m out of my depth. Even if this morning’s bullshit doesn’t ruin whatever potential is there, what then? I’m here for one more day, then I have to be back at work. I have a life in Illinois, and he has a life here, and neither of us is young or stupid enough to give that up on the off chance of this working out.”

“That’s...” Cas could almost feel Jimmy’s exhale through the smooth glass of the phone screen. “Yeah. That’s rough, Cas. But I think you’ve articulated the issues pretty well, so you just have to—well, you remember what you told me junior year with Amelia?”

How could he forget? He’d mentioned it in his speech at their wedding, and one of the three of them, or even Claire in recent years, brought it up at every anniversary celebration: _“Talking this sappy bullshit at me isn’t going to get you a girlfriend. Make a move or don’t, but stop fucking bugging me about it.”_

“Yeah, all right,” Cas conceded. “Though I have to point out that your comparison falls about eighteen months of swooning short of accuracy.”

“You’re never going to give me the perfect circumstances, I’ll take what I can get.”

The clock above his head buzzed, and Cas’s knee popped unflatteringly as he pushed to his feet. “Never get old,” he told his twin uselessly. “I have to go. Thank you, Jimmy.”

“Whatever happens, we’re here for you. Love, Cas.”

Students started filing out both doors. Some walked right by, but more than a few caught sight of him against the far wall and stopped, causing a traffic jam in the exits. As more people piled up, whispering and staring at him, one brave soul readied a blank page of her notebook and a pen and took a step towards him.

He forced a smile he didn’t feel, determined not to make things any worse for Dean, and tried to keep the impatient nerves out of his voice as he told her, “Now’s not really a good time, sorry.”

Either college students were more sensitive than he remembered or he wasn’t entirely successful in sounding friendly, because her whole face turned pink around wide eyes and she hurried off. The hallway cleared quickly after that, but even when the stream of students ceased, there was no sign of Dean.

Cas gave him what felt like another few minutes, but since he wasn’t sure he breathed during it, it couldn’t have been that long. Dean still didn’t appear. Cas didn’t want him to think he’d left, so he screwed up his courage and opened the door.

Seated at a desk at the front of the classroom, Dean didn’t look up at Cas’s entrance. His attention centered on the phone before him, where he scrolled quickly through page after page. Cas had a pretty good idea what he was looking at. He crossed the floor to stand in front of Dean; from there, he could see tweet after tweet flashing by.

“Dean,” he started. But he didn’t know how to continue the way Jimmy would’ve wanted him to, sincere and snark-less. It left him too vulnerable. It was also dishonest, in a way, since he wasn’t planning to change his normal personality so drastically so late in life. So he went with his first instinct, instead; he was himself. “Have you read the one with the double-ended dildo? I found it surprisingly erotic for one hundred and forty characters.”


	4. Sirius

Cas stood over him with a look on his face that Dean had never seen there before; neither since meeting him in person the day before nor in the years of interviews and televised debates he’d watched. And rewatched, sometimes. Before Dean could decipher it, or respond about the dildo comment (which he had seen, in fact, just a few seconds before the door opened), his phone sprang to life and Sam’s face covered the page of tweets.

Since he’d already had a voicemail and three texts from his brother by the time he finished class, and he was fond enough of the kid not to want him dead of a premature heart attack, he answered.

“Heya, Sammy.” He kept his tone light and conversational, his eyes still locked with Cas’s.

“Don’t _heya_ me, Dean! What the hell is going on? Are you okay? Is that really you and Castiel Novak? I called Bobby and he said Rufus said you picked up a highway hobo, was he talking about Castiel Novak?” The words gained speed as the questions continued, but at least Sam’s voice lost volume instead of gaining it after his first annoyed yell at Dean.

Tuning out the interrogation as it carried on in the same vein—“Did you seriously take Castiel Novak home?”—he studied Cas a little more and concluded that at least part of the wide eyes and snark came from a place of concern. Well, the eyes, at least. The snark came from Cas in general.

“Dean,” Sam said with the stressed air of having to repeat himself, “did you sleep with Castiel Novak?”

“Yep.” He winked at Cas, because leaving him confused and impatient was more than fair repayment for the morning’s mischief, but he didn’t want that helpless, worried expression to stick around. Teasing was one thing; letting Cas think Dean was actually upset with him about the potential social media shit-storm would be too cruel. “You want an autograph or something?”

Some of the tension left Cas’s shoulders at that, but he didn’t smile back. Dean felt his own smile dropping away. He quirked an eyebrow in question and got nothing meaningful in response, just Cas continuing to look at him expectantly.

Maybe Cas wasn’t worried he would be upset; maybe _Cas_ was upset. Dean had been the one to suggest the coffee shop, after all—but Cas had agreed, and he’d been the one to get all up in Dean’s space when they were there, _and_ he’d all but insisted on accompanying Dean’s class.

Cas didn’t have any right to be mad at him about it. He’d made his own choices, and anyway, he was supposed to be used to this whole fame bullshit.

But Dean didn’t think that’s what it was. Despite Cas’s smart-assed exterior, he’d treated Dean well. Treated Dean _very_ well. So well that just remembering the juxtaposition of attentive care and scorching hot command was causing a reaction that really wasn’t appropriate for sitting in his classroom, on the phone with his brother.

Sam hadn’t stopped for Dean’s thought process. “Is he there right now? Honestly, Dean, I’m impressed you’re actually functioning—”

“I’m gonna have to call you back, Sammy.”

“Is everything okay?”

Sam’s excitement tapered off in the face of Dean’s unusual dismissiveness. Touching as the concern was, Dean couldn’t deal with it on top of figuring out what was going on with Cas. One thing at a time, and Cas was his more immediate problem for multiple reasons. In addition to being right next to him, Cas was still a relative unknown to Dean.

Sam’s relationship with Dean would recover from Dean hanging up on him, if it was even damaged at all, which he doubted. His relationship with Cas—and new though it was, whether it was just fucking, or just friendship, or something in between, or even maybe something more, it was _something_ enough to qualify as a relationship—might not take a wrench in the works so well. So, triage.

“Yeah,” he answered Sam, hoping it wasn’t a lie. “I’m good. Later, nerd.”

If Sam argued against the epithet, Dean didn’t hear it as he lowered the phone from his ear and hit the button to end the call. He tried raising both his eyebrows at Cas, and again got nothing but an intense stare back, so he gave in to the urge to diffuse the situation and said, “I’m not opposed to the idea, but I don’t actually have a double-ended dildo to try it with. There’s a store I know downtown if you wanna give it a go after your talk, though.”

It seemed to be the right tack; Cas’s worryingly blank expression cracked into a wicked smirk. Dean sagged in relief, but he still needed to figure out what was behind Cas’s... Well, he needed to figure out exactly what it had been, in addition to the cause. Anger? Panic? He had too many questions and no idea where to start.

“So getting caught buying coffee with me wasn’t exciting enough for you, you want to get caught buying _coffee supplies_ with me? Should I be worried that you’re just in this for the attention?”

Dean’s heart thudded painfully at the accusation, but in the breath he took to respond, he realized that this was a tone and expression he did recognize. This was the Cas who’d given him shit about his pickup line, who’d kept Dean on the agonizing edge of a semi all the way to his lecture hall. Cas was teasing him, and as far as he could tell, that was a fantastic sign.

He needed to stop doubting himself—not that knowing that had ever stopped that particular lifelong battle. And in his defense, he didn’t think there was a soul in the world who could truthfully say they’d believe their good luck if their celebrity crush fell into their lap, literally and figuratively, and gave all appearances of instantly liking it there. He was entitled to a bit of incredulity.

But by God, was he going to push his luck while it lasted.

“I wouldn’t say it’s _just_ for the attention. The sex and the sass are also pretty decent compensation for opening my home to you. And, you know, my legs.

“Cas,” he added, dropping the humor to make sure there were no lingering uncertainties, “I don’t give a shit about the attention. Could I have done without it? Yeah, sure. I’m so unprepared for all of it that it would make a great sitcom. But it’s not anything harmful. It’ll blow over, or maybe it won’t, but I’ll still be fine either way.”

“Your brother seemed concerned.”

Cas really wasn’t making it easy to reassure him. It was almost enough to make Dean worry that he was looking for excuses, but everything Dean knew about the man indicated that wasn’t his style. Cas hadn’t beaten around any bushes with Dean yet, and he certainly didn’t equivocate his thoughts anywhere else Dean had seen.

“Yeah, that’s what family does. Especially my family. You tellin’ me your brother wouldn’t be worried?”

“Is worried,” Cas admitted, softening. He didn’t look like he was waiting for Dean to hit him anymore, at least.

Cas pulled the chair next to Dean around, only scraping the floor a little bit to shit—and that was normal, anyway. Turning it so it was facing Dean instead of the board, he tucked himself behind the notebook-sized desk attached to it. He opened his mouth, then closed it and scowled down at his own lap. Rather than whatever apparently important statement he’d been planning, he said, “I feel absurd.”

Something about the complaint, oddly plaintive to have come out of the frown of such a serious expression, just cracked Dean up. Or maybe it was the whole situation catching up with him; either way, he started laughing and couldn’t stop, even when he couldn’t breathe anymore and had to hunch over his own desk to hold himself up.

Tears streamed from his eyes when he finally got enough control back to prop himself up on one arm and look up at Cas. Cas wasn’t laughing, but his mouth had curved up into a smile at last. With a flash of teeth, even.

Wiping his cheeks, Dean took a deep breath to steady his voice. “Sorry. I just—this whole thing is absurd, Cas. If someone had told me after class yesterday that in less than twenty-four hours I’d have the hottest and smartest man I’ve ever jacked off to, much less slept with, whining at me from a grown-up kindergarten chair... But it’s the best kind of absurd, at least as far as I’m concerned.”

Dean stood. Cas stayed in his absurd little chair and tilted his head back to follow Dean’s approach. Though he was silent until Dean reached him, as soon as Dean stopped and inhaled to speak, Cas broke open his smirk to ask, “Jacked off to me, did you?”

Ah, fuck. Had Dean really said that? Going by Cas’s Cheshire grin, yes, he sure as shit had. It wasn’t a particularly embarrassing admission, given the _actual sex_ part, but Dean still found his face heating. He had to force himself not to look away from Cas’s smug face; to shrug and say, “Sure, once in a while. When the usual childhood fallbacks of Marcia Brady and Ronald Reagan didn’t cut it.”

Cas prodded him in the ribs. “Not even as a joke.”

“All right,” Dean relented, “no Reagan. Harrison Ford, though.”

Hooking his fingers into Dean’s belt loops to pull him closer, Cas pretended to look thoughtful before finally declaring, “I’ll allow it.”

“You’ll allow it?” Dean parroted, laughing and trying very hard not to notice how close Cas’s mouth was to his crotch. That effort did not prove successful. “You’ll _allow_ me to have spent my teenage years getting off to the thought of being double-teamed by Indy and Lara Croft?”

It was probably a mistake to even think about, never mind bring up, when he was doing his best not to get hard right in Cas’s face, standing in an already compromising position in a classroom where he worked, where a colleague or student could walk in at any time.

Sure enough, Cas’s expression flashed downright predatory and Dean knew he was a goner. “Mmm, we’re definitely going to talk about that later. No, Dean. I would never ask you to deny or forget any part of your sexual past.”

How he managed to be so earnest and sweet while eyeing Dean like he wanted to eat him alive, Dean had no idea. It was a damn good look to be pinned with, if slightly incongruous to Cas’s words. He fixed that in no time, though.

“All I meant was that I’ll allow you to continue keeping me in such esteemed company.”

Cas tugged again, so that Dean was standing straddled over his knees, and seemed put out that the half-desk stopped Dean from going any further. As consolation, Dean leaned in and rested his forearms on Cas’s shoulders. The position arched Dean’s back in a way that was nothing short of indecent, as well as putting their faces within inches of each other. He watched in fascination as Cas’s pupils dilated with his next breath.

“If you think,” Dean started, hot with the way Cas’s eyes tracked his lower lip, “that anything in this world has the power to stop me from spending the rest of my life reliving last night, you’re not nearly as brilliant as you think you are.”

Hands slipping away from Dean’s belt loops, Cas curved them over the waistband of his pants. He didn’t try to unbutton the fly, but used his curled fingers to drag the fabric down and away from Dean’s belly so that the other side pulled tight across Dean’s ass. It took all of Dean’s willpower not to shove his crotch right at Cas and just beg for it.

He wasn’t sure what _it_ was; wasn’t sure he cared as long as it was something.

“Give me an hour.” Cas’s voice rumbled straight through Dean, ending with a throb in his dick. “I’ll make you forget all about last night. Give me three hours and I’ll make you forget the whole week.”

“Fuck.”

Dean didn’t have a brain anymore. It was gone, probably forever, melted right out of his head and poured like hot wax down his spine. His whole body felt molten, burning with heat that was likely to consume him from the core. Lost in the searing tension, he was about to do something equal parts regrettable and amazing, like maybe drop himself the rest of the way onto Cas’s lap and hump him like a desperate teenager.

Then Cas’s coat pocket buzzed loud enough to startle both of them, and the moment was broken.

“Shit.”

Dean jerked himself upright and staggered a few steps back. It gave Cas room to reach for his phone, though he didn’t immediately. From the way his eyes took a minute to track to Dean’s new position and focus there, he seemed just as dazed as Dean felt.

More importantly, it gave Dean room to breathe again and realize that he’d been seconds away, if that, from a career-ruining mistake. He wasn’t in control when he was around Cas, and as exhilarating as that was, it was also dangerous.

Cas licked his lips and closed his eyes before answering his insistently vibrating phone. His words sounded vaguely apologetic, though the tone was abrupt. Nuance beyond that was lost to Dean, even though he couldn’t tear his eyes away from Cas.

The noise of a thousand racing thoughts drowned out what Cas was saying, but one thing kept rising above the chaos to the forefront of Dean’s mind: this was it. This was the pinnacle of his life, the moment where he had everything he wanted. His dream job, where he could teach and tinker, with colleagues he adored. A house that suited him like he’d built it himself; it even had a perfectly sized workshop. Good relationships with his family, near and far, that had been hard-won through rocky years. A gorgeous and brilliant man who couldn’t seem to get enough of him, who wasn’t just Castiel Novak but was _Cas_.

And he was poised to lose it all with one wrong move.

It should’ve been terrifying. Maybe it would’ve been, if not for the twin rushes of arousal and adrenaline still working their way through his blood. With them, he was ecstatic instead of scared, brave instead of doubtful.

He had everything he wanted. He could lose it with a wrong move. But he could also, he was suddenly sure, _keep_ it with a right one.

So as soon as Cas stood and hung up, he didn’t waste time. He didn’t wait to hear what Cas’s furrowed brow meant, or what his full lips were parting to say. He stepped right back into Cas’s space and kissed him. Soft and sweet, a different kind of passion than they’d exchanged before, he pressed his mouth to the pout of Cas’s lower lip and lingered as Cas stilled beneath his touch.

When he pulled back, just enough to meet Cas’s eyes again, they regarded him with bright confusion. Cas himself didn’t move, not even to close his slack jaw.

“I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you,” Dean said, but it wasn’t quite right. Not wrong, either, just not enough. “Everything. All of you. Not only in my bed, though you have to know I do. Fuck, do I ever. But—Cas, I want you in my _life_ , if you want to be there. I’m hoping you do, because I just got you and I’m not ready to give you up yet.”

Cas shoved him. Away from the desks; away from the doors. Dean stumbled back a step with the force of it, then another when Cas followed him and flattened his palms on Dean’s chest. The next push sent Dean against the wall and Cas crowded into him. It was a good thing Cas was holding Dean up with their bodies pressed together, because the heat in his eyes rendered Dean’s knees uselessly weak.

So much so that Dean nearly fell when Cas dropped down to a crouch in front of him. Cas’s hands on his hips kept him pinned, as did the hungry way Cas mouthed at the no longer deniable bulge in Dean’s pants. Then, out of nowhere, Cas stopped.

Rocking back on his heels, he looked up at Dean. “Please don’t mistake this for rejection or distraction or anything other than enthusiastic agreement. Yes, Dean. Yes, I want that. I want you. I want _us_ , however we can make that work.” He went resumed kissing along the hard line of Dean’s dick and Dean let his head fall back against the wall.

They’d make it work. Work. Shit, _work._

His hand flailed in the air through the first two blind tries before he caught it in Cas’s hair and tugged desperately. “Can’t,” he managed to groan, even though it very nearly broke his heart to put a stop to Cas’s attentions.

The only thing letting him bear it was Cas’s words replaying in his head. Cas said yes. Cas wanted him for more than just this, and that meant there would be time for more mind-rending blowjobs. Ones that didn’t spell disaster for Dean’s professional life.

“Not here. I have—anyone could walk in. Students. You have your talk.”

Cas stopped, but the grin he bestowed on Dean was nearly as dangerous as what his mouth had been up to before. “I know I have my talk. I thought maybe you’d like going to it, after. Listening to my voice all rough from how deep I let you shove your cock down my throat. All those people hearing the way you’ve claimed me, even if they don’t know it.

“Of course, some of them would know. The ones who’ve been following the news. The ones who know what a cocksucker sounds like when they’ve _really_ enjoyed themselves. When they’ve spent so long taking it so deep that you start to wonder if they were even breathing. If they even need to.”

Dean wasn’t ashamed of the whimper that died in his throat. Cas was a menace. A threat to all that was good and decent in society. He knew exactly what he was doing to Dean, just what buttons to push to make it feel like Dean was going to smoulder to pieces until there was nothing left of him but embers. Cas shamelessly reveled in the hold he had over Dean; why shouldn’t Dean revel in it, too?

With a heavy sigh, Cas pushed to his feet and backed away. “But you’re right, we shouldn’t do that here. It would definitely be inappropriate. Oh well.”

Dean might’ve bought the unaffected bullshit if not for how Cas’s pants weren’t fitting any better than his.

With a twitch at the corner of his mouth, Cas added, “If only we had access to a room with locking door and no windows and no one to bother us for some acceptable period of time. I can probably work with...” He raked his gaze over Dean and smirked. “Half an hour, give or take.”

Since Dean was likely to go off in half a minute and Cas knew it, those few simple words promised frustration and likely quite a lot of begging on Dean’s part. He was absolutely down for that. All the blood in his body was throbbing in his dick, which was the only reason it took him so long—at least, what felt like so long—to realize he could do that. He had that place:

“My office. We—my office.”

Dean was already moving when Cas grabbed his wrist.

“I have a better idea.”

* * *

It was a good thing Cas knew where he was going. For all that KU had been Dean’s campus for years, he felt like an overwhelmed freshman getting lost between the buildings for the first time. Cas guided him by the arm, but he might as well have been pulling Dean directly by the dick.

He didn’t know how Cas could be so controlled when he had to be feeling the need as much as Dean did, but that was part of his appeal. Hot, brilliant, sharp, _and_ commanding as fuck; Dean was the luckiest son of a bitch to walk the earth.

The irritated woman who awaited them in the small room off the lecture hall that Cas led him to didn’t seem to share Dean’s high opinion of Cas’s forcefulness. That had to be Hannah, Cas’s publicist.

“We need a few minutes alone,” Cas told her, and she snorted like an angry bull.

“You need to get your ass in gear because you owe me twenty minutes of prep. Christ, Cas, you’re on in less than half an hour.”

She kept berating him and Cas growled back and the two of them bickered like siblings, but Dean was lost on _twenty minutes of prep_.

He could picture it so vividly he almost felt Cas’s slick finger circling around his hole, rubbing but not pushing in. He’d be such a bastard about it, too. Considering how patient and exacting Cas had been when talking Dean through sucking him off, there was no way he’d be any less diligent when taking his time with Dean’s pleasure.

It seemed a safe bet that he and Cas weren’t going to get their minutes alone—Cas had already wound down from glaring to resigned scowling—so Dean tried to reign himself in instead of working himself up further with daydreams of Cas’s finger working into him. Just one, millimeter by millimeter; five, ten minutes before it would be all the way in.

That line of thinking didn’t do anything to distract Dean from the sex he wouldn’t be having just yet. Neither did Cas whirling away from his dwindling argument and pulling Dean along behind him. He manhandled Dean to a chair and pressed him down into it, not that Dean resisted. Though when Cas gripped the back of his neck and dragged Dean into a heated kiss, tongue claiming Dean’s mouth like it belonged there (which it did, as far as Dean was concerned), that almost got him right back up out of the seat.

Hand planted on Dean’s chest to keep him down, Cas loomed over him with bright, sharp eyes. “Stay right here,” he ordered.

Affection and arousal left Dean’s spinning. He’d probably have to get used to that, spending time around Cas. Maybe someday it wouldn’t turn him dumb, but it wasn’t someday yet. Dean tried to smirk, but it felt lopsided and dazed as he leaned forward, pushing against Cas’s palm, and drawled, “Woof.”

The smile that broke open across Cas’s face blazed like sunlight before he put it away and turned to let his manager fuss over him. Dean settled back in the chair to wait.

He’d planned to attend Cas’s talk before everything had unfolded, but staying in the storage-closet-cum-green-room seemed like a good idea when he couldn’t trust himself not to jump Cas right onstage. Besides, he was pretty sure he could find _someone_ to give him their lecture notes.

When Cas was ready, he looked back at Dean one last time at the door to the main hall. A little steadier this time, Dean shooed him out with a smile and a nod. “Go on. I’ll be here.”

If he watched Cas’s ass until the door closed and blocked his view, it was just to have something to hold him over. There was no one to judge him.

Except Hannah. Apparently she hadn’t left with him, and Dean had failed to notice in his preoccupation. She studied him with an intense focus that again reminded him a little of Cas, and he tried to look reassuring and harmless. Much as he hoped he wasn’t on her shitlist, he didn’t hold his breath. If he had her job, he’d be on his shitlist for sure.

But when she smiled at him, it seemed genuine.

“I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt,” she said. “Because you don’t strike me as the glory- or drama-seeking type, and also because it’s written into my contact very clearly that Cas’s personal life is none of my business except when it comes to managing the fallout. Not that it stops him from oversharing when he wants to make me stop lecturing him,” she added with a contemplative look that made Dean wonder what Cas had shared about him. Belatedly, she extended a hand. “Hannah Johnson.”

He took it without standing; Cas might not’ve meant for him to stay _exactly_ there, but he also might have. Dean wasn’t going to take any chances, and from the sparkle in her eye, Hannah guessed at the reason for his sedentary handshake.

“Dean Winchester, though I’m guessing you already knew that.”

“That is my job,” she agreed. “And while what Cas does with you isn’t, the effect that has on his public image is. So I’d appreciate knowing what I’m going to be dealing with, here. If I can ever get Cas in one place long enough, I’ll get his answer too, but I want to hear your side of the story.”

“My side of... how we met?”

Hannah’s soft look hardened, though Dean couldn’t pinpoint exactly what had changed about the expression. Her smile still curved up gently, but it didn’t have any warmth to it anymore. “I’m more interested in where you’re planning to go from here.”

Sitting forward with his arms braced on his knees, Dean raised his eyebrows. He and Cas had just started figuring their shit out, and he didn’t want to answer that on his own to someone he didn’t know. “This feels like it’s straying into personal territory. Shouldn’t it only matter what Cas wants you to do about it?”

“Look.” Hannah sighed and leaned back against a folding table set up across from his chair. “I’m not asking about your intentions with my daughter. But in addition to being my most successful and favorite client, for all he’s a pain in the ass, Cas is my friend. So, on a non-professional level, yes. I’d like some reassurance that you’re not going to dick him around.”

“How do you know he’s not dicking me around?”

Dean was actually curious about that. He knew—was pretty sure he knew. Hannah obviously had a lot more familiarity with Cas, but that question meant that either Cas had said something to her when Dean wasn’t around, or she’d seen something in the brief interaction between them that she’d observed. Either way, he really wanted to know what it was. But Hannah didn’t answer, so after a staring contest that he definitely didn’t win, he gave in.

“All I can say is that we’re gonna try. I don’t know how it’ll work out, we haven’t had much chance to talk details. But I want it to. I really, really do, and I think he does too.”

“He does.” Hannah relaxed, her smile kind once more. “Thank you, Dean. I’m sorry for the confrontation, but as I said, Cas is important to me. I really am happy for both of you.” Pushing away from her perch, she favored him with another considering assessment and said, “I should go. Cas has my number if you need any help dealing with the coverage.”

When she was gone, Dean groaned and fell against the back of the chair so dramatically that his head smacked into the wall. Rubbing at the sore spot, he considered his options. Cas would be gone at least another hour, probably more. There was supposed to be time for questions, though he wouldn’t put it past the surly asshole to rush through it. He’d be a little pleased, actually; he was pretty eager to see Cas again, too.

But even if that happened, which he couldn’t count on, it would be a while.

His little chat with Hannah had killed what remained of his immediate horniness, and anyway he wasn’t about to jack off in a university storage room. Even a university storage room where he could be reasonably sure that no one would be interrupting him for more than enough time. Because it would be inappropriate, not because he thought Cas wouldn’t like it. Not _just_ because he thought Cas wouldn’t like it.

He didn’t feel like braving the Twitter storm again just yet, and he was too keyed up from everything to just read or nap. So, stretching his legs out and digging in his pocket for his phone, he made a call.

“Hey, Sammy. So, about this thing with Cas...”

* * *

Dean was off the phone by the time Cas returned, but only barely. He hadn’t even realized how much time had passed in conversation with his brother, and while he would’ve liked to blame it on Sam’s chattiness, the truth was that Dean couldn’t stop talking. He was excited and nervous, but it had also been long enough that the sheen of wonder had worn off and he’d started to worry.

So many complications could mean disaster for a new relationship: the potential for press scrutiny and speculation, the whirlwind speed of their getting together, the distance. The distance worried him most. He couldn’t ask Cas to leave Chicago; he had family there, not to mention a prominent career. But neither could Dean imagine leaving Lawrence. His job might not be much in comparison, but he loved it, and he loved being so close to his family.

Where did that leave them?

But the door opened and Cas’s triumphant stride paused for no reason Dean could guess other than Cas just stopping to smile at him. They’d figure it out. Five hundred miles was nothing to one of the brightest scientific minds of the age and Dean, who was at least smart enough to bullshit his way through a doctorate.

“How’d it go?”

Instead of answering directly, Cas reached back to latch the deadbolt as the door closed behind him. The heat in his gaze brought as he closed in on Dean brought his dormant arousal spinning back up in no time; he wasn’t hard when Cas reached him, but he was definitely making an effort in that direction.

Though Dean shivered with the rush of blood and exhilaration, he barely moved otherwise, waiting until Cas was upon him to wet his lips in anticipation. Cas looked like he wanted to stick _something_ in Dean, and whether it was his dick or tongue or fingers, Dean was ready to take it. It wasn’t a classroom. The door was locked. Good enough.

Eyes dark, Cas followed the path of Dean’s tongue with his thumb, but when Dean tried to chase it, to suck it into his mouth, Cas pulled it away with a wicked smirk.

The protest that Dean hadn’t even started forming died an unattended death in the back of his mind, because all his concentration was immediately redirected when Cas dropped to his knees between Dean’s legs. He stayed there unmoving, gaze intent on Dean’s crotch, long enough that Dean started getting nervous again. Was Cas waiting for him to do something?

He reached for the button at the top of his fly, which spurred Cas into action, but not the action Dean expected.

“No,” Cas barked, and Dean froze. Not looking up, Cas ordered, “Hands on the chair. Legs spread. Let me see you get hard for me. That’s it.”

Between the arms of the chair and the ever-growing tightness at the front of his jeans, Dean wasn’t sure he could spread his legs any more. But when Cas said, “Further,” he tried anyway, because Cas wanted him to. All it did was increase the pressure of his zipper and the seam of his pants against his dick. It strained against the fabric, and Cas watched hungrily as it filled out.

Only when Dean was as hard as he’d ever been, swallowing down whines and doing his best not to hump the air, did Cas touch him. He rubbed the heel of his palm over Dean through his pants, knocking loose a whimper and making Dean’s dick twitch and throb at him. His knuckles blanched white with how hard he was gripping the sides of the chair.

Still kneading Dean idly, Cas said, “Someday—not today, not here. I know you need boundaries here, it’s where you work. But someday, somewhere else, I’m going to wake you up in the morning and put you in a pair of nice, sturdy, jeans with nothing on underneath. Navy, or maybe black; they’d have to be dark.”

He ran his palm up the length of Dean’s trapped erection then lifted off and started to trace around its shape on Dean’s thigh.

“I’ll take you out for breakfast and get you off under the table while you eat your eggs and bacon and pretend I’m not making you make a mess of your pants. Then we’ll go for a nice stroll while you’re still covered in your own come, feeling it every time you take a step.

“Maybe we’ll go shopping and you can blow me in the fitting room. And if you’re very good and quiet, and you make sure not to let anything drip onto my clothes...”

Cas popped the button of Dean’s pants and he groaned, relieved but more worked up than ever at Cas’s scenario.

“...then I’ll rub you through your jeans again. The last one will be dry by then, crusty and not particularly pleasant, but I’ll still make you feel so good.” He unzipped Dean’s fly and parted the fabric, but left him in his underwear. “So good, Dean, that you won’t be able to stop yourself from adding to it.”

Dean couldn’t take anymore. At this rate, Cas’s someday was going to be _today_ , and he really didn’t want to walk around campus with an obvious come stain on his unforgivingly light khakis. “Cas. Cas, please.”

Finally looking up at him, Cas graced Dean with a smile that flashed his gums and lit up his eyes. “Forgive me for getting carried away, Dean. You’ve been so patient.”

When Cas gently tugged his underwear down and freed his dick at last, Dean could’ve wept with joy. But Cas wasn’t done teasing him; he circled his hand around Dean and rubbed his thumb around the head of his dick until the slit spit out a fat drop of precome for Cas to swipe away. He leaned in, not to take Dean into his mouth, but to lick his own thumb clean less than an inch away from Dean.

“Bastard,” Dean groaned.

Cas laughed, his breath puffing maddeningly against Dean’s sensitive skin, then his mouth descended around Dean without warning. It took all of Dean’s dwindling control not to shout or fuck up into him. His fingers were probably going to ache for days with the effort of holding himself down on the chair.

Though he didn’t quite hold to his terrible promise to drag Dean along for half an hour, Cas pulled off the first time his enthusiastic tongue got Dean close enough to the edge that his legs started to shake. Cas turned its talents to Dean’s balls instead, urging him to the edge of the chair and gingerly lifting his dick out of the way, and that was pretty fucking good too.

Dean came at last with Cas’s lips wrapped around his dick, one of Cas’s hands rolling his balls while the other gripped Dean’s fingers around the chair, and the beautiful thought exploding in his mind before everything flashed away that, just maybe, he really could have this forever.


	5. Bellatrix

The first time Cas had gotten to look through a real telescope—an observatory’s powerful Cassegrain reflector, not his dinky backyard version, which he nevertheless loved—he was mesmerized by the detail he could see on the surface of the moon. Craters he could by that point identify by memory had never looked so clear and close. Smaller craters, too; ones whose names he didn’t know, ones he’d never seen before. He could see the web of lines running through the empty seas, the whole thing lit up with a pearly glow of reflected sunlight.

Jimmy, who’d come along once again out of love for Cas rather than any interest of his own, had eventually had to drag Cas away from the eyepiece so that other kids could get a look. Cas was too enthralled by the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

The same thing had happened when his mother had given him a beautiful colored poster of the Pillars of Creation, nearly as wide across as he was tall. She and Jimmy had helped him hang it next to his bed without even complaining about how long it took to position it to his demanding standards. That night and many nights after, he lay on his side and stayed awake for hours to stare at the billowing clouds of the nebula, colors faint and faded in the minimal light carrying in from the street.

And again when he got to watch a meteor shower in an open field miles from the nearest light source, and when he successfully modeled the theoretical path of an asteroid caught in Jupiter’s gravitational pull. That last kept him spellbound for hours as the simple monochrome animation looped over and over; a creation of his own hands and mind.

The dazed wonder written across Dean’s face as he slumped back in the chair, body lax and spent but struggling to stay upright enough that he could keep looking down at Cas, brought out the same warm amazement a thousand times stronger. Dean was gorgeous to begin with; his looks had drawn Cas in right from the start, boyishly cute when he smiled, ruggedly handsome with a full day’s stubble and a thoughtful frown, and somehow equally suited to both. Dean drunk with climax, blushing and staring at Cas like he’d set off the Big Bang, made him beautiful beyond compare.

Cas could admit that part of his joy in it came from possessive pride, too. Not just the warm flush of knowing he’d wrung that look from Dean, though that was part of it. It burned deeper and fiercer than that. It wasn’t just the moment that was his; it was the man. Dean wanted him. Dean wanted to _be his_ , as more than just a casual (if spectacular) sex partner. He hadn’t had that, hadn’t wanted it since—well, like Jimmy had said, it was a while. He didn’t need to think about the details with Dean’s cock still flushed and thick and shiny right in front of him.

Much better to slide his tongue up it and feel Dean shudder all over in response: his fingers clenching under Cas’s, his balls twitching in Cas’s hand, his throat trembling out a whine. “Cas, fuck.”

“Mm,” Cas agreed, kissing the tip just to watch Dean squirm. But he still kept his hands on the chair, gripping the sides so hard it had to hurt, because Cas hadn’t told him he could stop. As amazing and arousing as that was, he didn’t want to cause Dean incidental harm. So he let go of Dean’s testicles to reach for the other hand and gently eased both sets of fingers loose and brought each to his lips. Dean followed the move with his gaze, his tongue peeking out from his slack mouth and his eyes wide and sparkling.

“How are you so perfect?” Cas was mostly talking to himself, but the pretty pink lighting up under Dean’s freckles and his soft, shy denial snapped Cas to attention. He left off his idly contended musings to scrutinize Dean more closely. He didn’t much like what he found.

Cas had no patience for false modesty. He refused to engage in it himself—he wouldn’t pretend to be stupider than he was for anyone’s benefit, and being honest about his many flaws earned him the right to be honest about his many strengths, as far as he was concerned—and he didn’t tolerate it from others. There was too much of import going on in the world to waste time with insincere prevarications. Pride might have been a sin, but he didn’t give a particular shit about that sort of thing.

The trouble was, there didn’t seem to be anything false or insincere about Dean’s insistence that he was nothing special. It was a flash of the same self-effacement Dean had shown earlier in his office, belittling his own intelligence and accomplishments in favor of Cas’s. Cas wasn’t humble about either of those, but he could appreciate them in others, too, and found it unacceptable for a man as educated, clever, and honest as Dean to think so poorly and so incorrectly of himself.

It also rankled to have Dean refuse his compliments, because he wasn’t one to give them out easily. He didn’t believe in meaningless platitudes any more than all the other meaningless crap people spewed, and he wasn’t about to begin his relationship with Dean by letting him think Cas was anything less than fully invested in his praise. Setting Dean’s hands down on his thighs, Cas stood and pressed into the spread of Dean’s legs. Dean turned his face up to him, but Cas put a hand to the underside of his jaw to hold his head up anyway, just in case he got any stupid ideas about looking away.

“Dean, please listen carefully.”

“You’re only gonna say this once and it’ll be on the test?”

Even Dean could tell the joke fell flat immediately; his eyes dropped, but Cas’s fingers on his chin stopped him from ducking away. Cas waited for Dean to meet his eyes again before continuing.

“I’ll say it as many times as I need to, but I still want you to pay attention: I’m an asshole.”

“Cas—”

“Listen,” he repeated, but added force to it: his voice low, his hand just a little firmer against Dean’s skin. Dean’s lips parted and his pupils dilated, but Cas had to ignore the heat that reignited in him. His cock could wait.

“I’m an asshole.”

Dean didn’t protest a second time.

“And a cynic. I’m a bossy and sarcastic jackass, and I’ll never be apologetic about that. Most importantly, at the very core of my identity, I’m a scientist; a realist. I don’t believe in love at first sight, or soulmates, or any of that overly romanticized crap. No one is destined to be with some other arbitrarily selected person. So when I say you’re perfect, I’m not crediting fate or luck.

“It’s you, Dean. Who you are as a person. The effort you put forth in everything you do. The words you choose, the actions you take, the trust you give me. It’s not a word I use casually, but I’m prepared to defend it. Do you understand?”

Dean looked just as dazed as he had the first night—just the night before. It felt like so much longer, Cas could hardly believe it. Measurable time was, in that particular part of the universe and under those particular circumstances, moving at a steady and reliable pace; but subjective awareness of it changed. Everything with Dean was processing as a new experience, stretching his perception of time’s passing.

It said something about how long it had been since he’d done any of it: sex, romance, the trappings of a new relationship. But there also were aspects of what he was doing with Dean that were entirely unfamiliar. Excitement burned in him, slow but ember-hot, and he appreciated being able to savor the moments thanks to that peculiarity of neurology.

“Okay,” Dean said hoarsely. Then, clearing his throat, “I mean, I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say to that. I appreciate the, the sentiment, and the intent behind it, but I don’t... I have trouble with compliments, sometimes. I can’t _make_ myself believe them just because you’re the most romantic asshole I’ve ever met.”

Though Cas hadn’t thought any of what he’d said had been overly romantic—quite the opposite, actually—he filed it away as yet another symptom of Dean being uniquely enchanted by his misanthropy. Right next to it, a characteristic of Dean he’d rapidly grown to treasure: the ease and openness with which he communicated complex feelings. It was a rare trait, one usually developed only when there was a need for it. And even then, not painlessly.

At least, not in Cas’s experience.

He wanted to comment on it, maybe tease the story from Dean, but it could wait. He wouldn’t push him on accepting praise. Not too hard, anyway. “Of course I don’t expect you to make yourself believe them. That’s my job.”

Dean’s hands finally came away from the seat. One wrapped around each of Cas’s wrists and tugged him down to a stoop so Dean could throw his arms around Cas’s neck. Cas went without complaint and was treated to a long taste of Dean’s mouth.

“There you go being unnervingly sweet again,” Dean complained with a grin when he let Cas go, not that Cas went far. “How do I know you’re not some alien body snatcher that’s taken over my favorite jackass?” 

It was a joke; Dean’s smirk and crinkled eyes gave him away. But Cas still schooled his face to seriousness and said, “Because there’s been no compelling evidence of extraterrestrial life on Earth. The likelihood of such a being coming to our planet, taking over my body sometime since I had you in my mouth, since I was a ‘bastard’ then, and using this new form for the terribly nefarious purpose of seducing you—”

Dean cut him off with another kiss. “All right, there’s the jackass.”

A knock interrupted before Cas could answer that, and a somewhat familiar voice—the student worker who’d set up the A/V equipment—hollered, “Dr. Novak, it’s all clear.”

Dean’s expression blanched to equal parts horrified and surprised, and Cas could only imagine what was going through his head.

“Thank you,” he called back, then explained to Dean, “It’s just the kid who was helping with the lecture. I told him I wanted to wait for the crowd to avoid talking to anyone. I think he must be a grad student; we had a surprisingly informed discussion on particle physics when he was getting the projector up.”

Ruefully, Dean shook his head. “You got played, Cas. Ash is a professor. Kind of a big deal, actually. One of the leading experts on quantum computing.”

“Then why was he there? Do they pay you so little that you need to take side jobs?”

“No, dumbass. He probably kicked a student off the job so he could meet you himself, and after he gave me a hard time for being a nerdy fan when we found out you’d be coming here.”

“Well.” Dean’s arms were still draped over his shoulders, so Cas sat down, settling himself across Dean’s thighs. “That’s because he didn’t know I’d be _coming_ here.”

“Ugh. Off.”

Standing before Dean’s shove could deposit him on his ass, Cas offered him a hand up. With a pointed look, Dean pulled the elastic waistband of his underwear up and over his cock and zipped his pants before taking it. Once Dean was on his feet, after a slight adjustment, he turned a smile on Cas that Cas would’ve called asinine if he were feeling uncharitable. Since he wasn’t, was in fact fairly sure his own face reflected the expression, he found himself charmed by it instead.

“So, what now? Do you have other things planned? Hannah just said that you had her number and left.”

He doubted that was all Hannah had really said, but he’d ask her about that later and determine if he needed to get surly about her overstepping or not. “No, no obligations. My itinerary’s free until tomorrow, and that’s just driving home. Well, it was. I suppose I’ll have to make other arrangements now.

Dean shared his grimace. “We could head over to the yard if you want, see what we can figure out.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Nah. Only thing on my itinerary is you.”

* * *

Dealing with his car turned out to be the easiest part of Cas’s changing plans; he’d just ship the Tesla back home and get it to one of the several service centers in Chicago.

“How made of money are you, exactly?”

Cas shrugged. “Hannah assures me that net worth is high enough that knowing the specifics would risk inflating my ego, so I let her worry about it. I’m not Bill Gates, but I’m wealthy. Most of it’s not, uh, available to me, though. I live off my salary from the planetarium, and royalties and appearance fees go into a fund for Claire or a handful of scholarships.”

Stopping short, Dean boggled at him. Cas didn’t think he’d said anything worth the soft look that followed, but he wasn’t about to protest Dean pushing him against the wall of the house they’d been walking up to and kissing him breathless. Someone else felt the need to object, though.

“Oh, for the love of—why you gotta come to my house for that, boy?”

Dean backed off, flushed darker than just the brief session of making out merited, and Cas turned his head to the porch and met the scowling gaze of one of the family members from Dean’s photo shelf, the uncle in the wheelchair. Bobby.

“Bobby,” Dean greeted. He sounded chipper despite circumstances, though the blush hadn’t faded at all. “Good to see you! How’s it going?”

“Was goin’ better about two minutes ago. Didja want something other than desecrating my home?”

Tense against the wall, Cas readied for an argument. Dean had said his family wasn’t a problem, and Cas wanted to believe it, but fury poured heat into his chest at the way the man talked to Dean. There were only so many ways to interpret his words, and none of them were good. For all that he and Dean had known each other less than a day, for all their relationship was barely formed and hardly defined at that, for all he’d just been worried about causing trouble for Dean’s family—he couldn’t let it stand. If he didn’t intend to let Dean treat himself as anything less than he was, he definitely wasn’t about to let anyone else do it.

But before he could intervene, Bobby’s eyes cut to him and his expression eased immediately to the worried and apologetic. “Aw, hell. Didn’t mean to upset you, son. I don’t get out much these days,”—he thumped the arm of his chair—“and I forget not everyone’s used to our particular brand of familial affection.”

Dean’s fingers easing his hand out of a fist was the first Cas knew he’d actually been clenching it into one. He looked back at Dean, ready to be taken to task for crossing a line, but all he got was that same warm look.

“Were you going to defend my honour?” Twining their fingers together, Dean tugged him away from the siding. He was only mocking Cas a little. “That’s sweet, really. Come on, lemme introduce you properly.”

It made sense, when he stopped to think about it. In fact, it wasn’t much different from the way he and Claire bantered back and forth, or even the well-meant mockery he and Dean had been giving each other pretty much from the start. The dynamic worked for them, and came so naturally to Dean that he had to have picked it up somewhere. Where else but family?

Walking up the ramp on one side of the porch, Cas recognized the house from that same photo. He’d been paying more attention to Dean than it on their approach. It had a new coat of paint since the picture, too; a clean, cheerful blue that looked as out of place amid the crumpled and rusted cars of the salvage yard as his moderately well-maintained Tesla. The car looked pristine, even if he’d let something go catastrophically wrong on the inside.

“Cas, this is my uncle, Bobby Singer. Bobby, Castiel Novak.”

They shook hands, and though Bobby seemed sincere in his gruff, “Good to meet you,” his grip tightened to just shy of menacing and he slanted Dean another unimpressed look. “Even if I hadn’t known who he was before last night, and Rufus hadn’t told us the whole damn story after climbin’ into bed at balls o’clock in the morning, you’d still be about four hours behind Twitter on the introduction.”

“Like you know what Twitter is!” Dean kicked one of Bobby’s wheels lightly. “I didn’t come here to be harassed, old man. Just thought it’d be rude not to stop in and say hi while we were here.”

Snorting, Bobby said, “Right. You didn’t wanna be rude.” He didn’t go any further down that line of accusation, but his eyes did make a pointed detour to the patch of wall Dean had had Cas up against just moments before. “Well, if you ain’t being rude, that means you’re staying for dinner. Y’ain’t vegetarian or nothing, are you?”

The last was directed to Cas, who shook his head.

“Good. Come on in, then. Rufus’s out on a call, but he oughta be back before too long. Ellen’s got her venison stew on.”

“What?” Dean grabbed Bobby’s shoulder as he turned to go back inside. “Bobby, no, I was just stopping by. I’m not...” Letting go of Bobby to rub the back of his neck, he nodded his head awkwardly at Cas. “It’s a little early to strongarm him into a ‘meet the family’ dinner, is all.”

Dean was trying to save him from discomfort; endearing but unnecessary. Unless it was just an excuse to save his family from the discomfort of Cas. That seemed equally likely. But it just earned them both an appraising look, before Bobby declared, “Bull. If you’re thinking about meeting the family dinners already, that’s all the more reason for you to get your ass inside.”

Though he didn’t try to stop Bobby from wheeling back through the door a second time, Dean did call after him, “Just because it took you idiots like two decades to sort out your shit, doesn’t mean that’s normal!”

To Cas, looking pained, he said, “I’m sorry. We really don’t have to, I’ll deal with him later.”

“I’m not scared of your family, Dean. We can absolutely leave if you don’t want to do this, whether it’s because you’ve already had a trying day or because you aren’t ready for me to meet them yet. I won’t be offended.”

And he wouldn’t think it was because Dean was ashamed of him, or had ulterior motives that precluded being open about their relationship. Though the worry was there, might always be there, he refused to give it any more time in his thought processes than acknowledging its existence. Dean had already proved that not to be the case with his reactions to being caught, both by his uncle and by the public at large: he wasn’t trying to hide or deny it, he wasn’t angry at Cas for the attention.

Just because his past experience had made him wary, didn’t mean Cas was going to let it rule his life and his new relationships. He could be trusting without being naive.

“But don’t turn them down for my sake,” he told Dean. “I didn’t punch Zachariah Adler, I can stand up to an interrogation from your nearest and dearest without being _too_ much of an asshole.”

Yet again that day, Dean rewarded Cas’s faith in him with a relieved smile. “Really, if you just act like yourself, I think you’ll get along. Ellen and Rufus both have a fondness for jackasses, which you can tell ’cause of how they married one, and he likes his own.”

“I heard that!” Bobby bellowed from just inside.

When Cas glanced through the door to see where Bobby had ended up, he instead found himself face-to-face with the woman from the photo of what he now knew to be the polygamous triad of Dean’s aunt and uncles. No wonder Dean’s sexuality hadn’t been an issue in his family. With her stare on him following that disambiguation of their relationship, it felt like he was being tested. Dean just leaned into Cas’s back, relaxed and supportive. For a guy who couldn’t stop talking about what a jackass Cas was—not that he disagreed—he had a lot of confidence that Cas wouldn’t be a dick to his family.

Fortunately, Cas didn’t plan to be a dick to his family. He extended a hand. “You must be Ellen.”

“Must be.” Though firm, her handshake wasn’t a grinding test of wills like Bobby’s had been. Maybe he’d been wrong about the test; she was nothing if not direct when she said, “Well, stew’s ready and the other old grump’ll be here any minute. We gonna get this interrogation started or what?”

Dean dropped his forehead to Cas’s shoulder and groaned. Together, they followed Ellen in.


	6. Antares

Dean’s leg would not stop bouncing. It kept pace with his eyes, darting back and forth between Bobby, who was looking down at his stew bowl and shoveling spoonfuls in his mouth, and Cas, who was staring at Bobby with a growing furrow making a crease in his brow. Meanwhile, Ellen had her face hidden behind her hands, but Dean was pretty sure she was concealing her laughter, not embarrassment; Rufus wasn’t even trying, leaning back in his chair and outright guffawing at the scene. Dean’s glare just made him laugh harder, brief though it was. Dean couldn’t look away from the tense moment between Cas and Bobby for any longer than that.

As Bobby gnawed on another chunk of venison, Cas took a deep breath and asked, voice worryingly flat, “What?”

Bobby took his time sweet time swallowing, then washed it down with a sip of beer before he looked back up to meet Cas’s eyes and repeated himself: “I said, you must tip the hookers pretty well.”

“Right,” said Cas. “The part I didn’t understand was _why_ you said it.”

“Well.” Bobby pointed his not-entirely-clean-spoon at Cas across the table. “You’re famous or controversial enough that people care who it is you might be fuckin’. Obviously.” The spoon made a detour to Dean before returning. “But as far as I can tell, there ain’t been anything for years, not since the speculation about your new publicist. Since you don’t seem to care if people find out, I figure that rumor wasn’t true and you haven’t been out with anyone else enough to get caught.”

“And this leads you to assume prostitutes instead of celibacy, naturally.”

“Naturally,” Bobby agreed.

Dean was disowning his whole family if they fucked this up for him. He’d been prepared for some awkwardness, but Bobby hadn’t been this much of a dick since he brought Gordon to dinner at the Roadhouse. While that hadn’t been what soured the relationship (credit for that went to a combination of Rufus not liking him, because Rufus liked to act ornery but he gave pretty much everyone a chance, and Gordon talking shit about bisexuality—to Dean, of all people), he and Jo had teamed up to lecture Bobby on how they were grown adults and didn’t need Papa Bear scaring off interested parties.

Either that talk hadn’t been as effective as he’d thought, or there was something particular about Cas that was setting Bobby off. Dean didn’t care which it was, he wasn’t going to put up with it.

“Bobby, knock it off. What the hell?”

When he first looked at Dean, Bobby’s face still had about half of a smug, judgmental smile on it; then, as he caught on that Dean was actually upset, it shifted past confusion and worry and into dark red embarrassment, through which he tried to stammer an explanation that took a few tries to come out. “He said—” Bobby turned to Rufus, scowling and accusatory. “You said Dean wanted us to grill him about the hookers!”

If Rufus had a reply to that, it was lost beneath the breathless laughter that had him doubled over, pounding on the table. Dean briefly hoped it would short-circuit his pacemaker, then was glad when it didn’t. Still, there would be a reckoning.

“When and why the hell would I have told him that? I haven’t seen or talked to him since last night when I met Cas, and we’ve been working or on each other’s dicks since then.”

Cas whipped back around to stare at him and Ellen yelled, “Dean Winchester!” though she was laughing too hard to really mean it. Dean smirked at both of them, and at Bobby’s sputtering, and shrugged.

“He wants to ask about Cas’s sex life, he gets to hear about Cas’s sex life. Besides,” he told Bobby, “you don’t get to bitch. I’m still scarred from that time you let me walk in on you and Rufus.”

With a snort, Rufus sat up and aimed one of his most obnoxious shit-eating grins at Dean. “Sure as shit taught you to knock, though, didn’t it?”

Why did Dean always give Rufus credit for being the nice one?

“Because you’re a dumbass,” Rufus said when he voiced the question. He was still wiping tears of amusement from his eyes. “When have you ever known me to pass up a chance to mess with you and ol’ iron legs at the same time?”

Face feeling as red and hot as Bobby’s looked, Dean said, “Since the answer obviously isn’t __when it means mortifying me in front of a new partner_ , I guess you’re right and I don’t know.” _

“Come on now, don’t be like that, Dean. He won’t last long if he can’t handle our bullshit. You know we mean it all in good fun.” Rufus reached over to pat Dean in the shoulder, and the only reason he didn’t shrug it off was that it would’ve made him feel too much like a surly teenager.

“Do I know that?” he muttered anyway. But when he snuck another glance at Cas, the man looked more amused than upset, so Dean let his hackles droop a little.

Ellen, traitor that she was, kicked Dean’s foot under the table. When he turned to frown at her, she proved she was no better than her men: dimpling faintly, she asked, “Partner, is that what we’re going with?”

Dean was too dignified, not to mention way too old, to crawl under the table to avoid the whole terrible thing: Ellen’s impish delight, Rufus’s renewed cackles, the intrusive line of questioning that was sure to follow. That didn’t make it any less tempting, especially when he started considering that if he went down there, he could slip between Cas’s legs on his knees, nudge his thighs apart, and—

And that was a dangerous line of thinking at the dinner table with his family. Even if they deserved it for putting him through this awkward crap when getting his mouth on Cas’s dick again sounded like a much better way to spend the evening. Hell, the way it was going, going to the dentist sounded like a better way to spend the evening.

“We’re not... We haven’t talked about what we’re going with, Ellen. It’s been—I don’t even know how many hours, but not a lot, since we even decided we’re giving this thing an actual shot. So if I promise to keep you all updated on whatever parts of my relationship are actually your business, and don’t make it into Twitter, will you assholes stop trying to scare him off?”

Dean’s aunt and uncles at least had the shame to look a little chagrined, even if they didn’t apologize, but Cas just took Dean’s hand off the table and lifted it to his lips. He really was the smoothest motherfucker.

Gaze warming Dean’s face even more, he said, “It’ll take more than that to scare me off. Besides, I’ve never really had the full family intimidation experience before. It’s kind of nice.”

That Dean had a hard time believing, despite the unwavering promise of Cas’s eyes locked on his. “Really?”

“Really. I mean,” he added, small smile sliding into something sinful, “the hookers weren’t exactly eager to take me home and introduce me to their loved ones.”

Though Dean found himself ridiculously enamored all over again by the man’s dry humor, for a long and gut-wrenching moment, Cas’s statement was met with nothing but stunned silence from the others at the table. Then, just when Dean’s heart started to drop and he tried to come up with either a way to salvage the joke or just flee the scene entirely (and bring Cas with him, of course, so he could follow through on his plans for Cas’s dick), Rufus burst into uproarious laughter. Ellen and Bobby joined in, and just like that the awkwardness was broken.

The rest of dinner was a lot less of an ordeal.

* * *

It was late when they got back to Dean’s, though not quite as late as it had been the night before. He stopped on the stoop, caught by how the yellowed porch light cast a warm glow across Cas’s forehead while pooling shadows under his brows and cheekbones, highlighted the dimple at the point of his chin. It was a dramatic look, light and darkness playing over his face, and Dean couldn’t help but stare, once again pondering the overwhelming completeness of his happiness in the moment.

The hottest, smartest man he could ever have dreamed up was leaning against the side of the house just next to the door, smiling as he waited for Dean to let him in. What could he possibly have done in his life to deserve that?

Then Cas tilted his head and asked, “Dean?” and Dean snapped back to reality.

“Sorry again for making you sit through that,” Dean said as he finally turned the key he’d been just holding in place and opened the door.

Cas followed him in, making a thoughtful noise. “I thought it went well.”

“Yeah, but, you know. It was a lot of family to get hit with at once, especially so early in—in the relationship.”

He thought he recovered well from stumbling over the words, which he had to tell himself were fine to say even if, like he’d said to Ellen, they hadn’t yet defined what exactly it was they were doing. Just that they were doing it. And it terrified him, a little; long distance relationships were notoriously difficult, and they were going to be going into it with about thirty-six hours of acquaintance. So maybe Cas was going to get back to Chicago and come to his senses and Dean would never hear from him again.

It would be a sane end to the madness that had been the past day of Dean’s life, but damn would it break his fucking heart. He had to believe that Cas was in it as much as he was, even if that did mean they were both crazy. Cas had given him no reason to doubt his sincerity—he’d been nothing but blunt about his intentions, and Dean couldn’t see any motivation for him to have lied about what he wanted. It wasn’t like Dean was a shy virgin waiting for The One; he’d been eager to jump Cas from the start without any expectations or promises.

And Cas made it so easy to trust him, when he said things like, “Your family is important to you, Dean. We’ve established that you want me to be part of your life, and that I want to be part of it, too. That means all of it. I want to meet the rest of your family, to introduce you to mine. As I understand it, that’s how healthy adult relationships are supposed to work.”

Forget Cas’s sex talk (or not; Dean never wanted to forget that), his sweetness was going to be the absolute death of Dean. “You can’t just say things like that,” he protested weakly.

Cas’s eyebrows lifted in surprise and confusion, but Dean was on him before he could voice his question, silencing it with his lips on Cas’s. They pressed together at length, Cas ceding control of the kiss mostly, Dean suspected, because it had caught him off guard. He took advantage while he could; he enjoyed letting Cas run the show very, __very_ _ much, but there was also a thrill to the idea of leaving Cas as breathless and molten as he left Dean.

So he shoved forward until he had Cas backed against a wall and dedicated himself to claiming Cas’s mouth. Lips, tongue, and teeth all set to making their mark, sliding and pushing, testing the limits of what Cas would allow him to get away with and finding no resistance even when he sunk his teeth into Cas’s lip so hard it would probably bruise. Cas groaned into it, his hands clutching at the curve of Dean’s ass to pull him even closer. Biting down just a little more, Dean wondered if Cas was remembering him doing it to his own lower lip in the Impala, the first outright flirtation he’d risked—and what a reward; Dean was definitely remembering the way Cas’s eyes had darkened as he watched Dean’s mouth move.

But for all Dean’s efforts, when he finally had to pull back for air, he was the one flushed and panting for breath. Cas spun him around without losing a beat, Dean’s chest hitting the wall and Cas’s lips pressing up to the sensitive spot behind his ear at the same moment, and __fuck_ _ that was so unfairly hot. Worse was when, after thoroughly destroying Dean’s ability to keep himself upright by licking and sucking all the way down the back and side of his neck, Cas moved his mouth back up to Dean’s ear. So close that his lips brushed the cartilage and his breath warmed Dean’s skin, Cas said, “I have a very important question for you, Dean.”

He seemed to be waiting for a response, but the best Dean could offer was a half-strangled grunt that didn’t even leave his mind as a word, never mind his lips. “Hmn?”

“Are we going to make it to the bed this time, or do you prefer on the floor?”

“Um,” Dean said. There was nothing else he could say when Cas punctuated the question by biting into the meat of his shoulder, the slow but steady pressure making the muscle ache in a way that went right to his dick. Also extremely hot and distracting: Cas’s hips pressing his to the wall, lined up so that he could feel Cas’s dick twitching and growing between his cheeks.

But Cas wanted an answer, so Dean wanted to give him one. It took more willpower than he knew he could muster at the moment to pull his thoughts together enough to decide. The floor was a great option. It was right there, they wouldn’t even have to move except to get their clothes off. Or just unzipped, if it came down to that. He relished the thought of adding to the bruising on his knees, lengthening the reminder he’d have left after Cas had to go.

But the bed. The bed was in Dean’s bedroom. Dean’s bedroom meant lube, and lube meant many wonderful things. Going upstairs before the brain- and body-liquefying sex would also save them from having to do it after. If it was going to be Dean’s last night with Cas, even if only until they could meet up again, he sure as hell planned to fuck until he couldn’t move.

“Bed.”

“Okay. Good, I like the sound of that.” Cas’s mouth pressed hot against the back of his neck, then he pulled away entirely. Sagging against the wall, Dean tried not to whimper; he wasn’t sure if he succeeded. “Come on, upstairs. You have one more decision to make by the time we get there, though.”

Dean turned, still leaning on the wall for support, which was good because Cas’s crooked smile weakened his knees yet again. He didn’t know what was coming and didn’t think he was ready for whatever it was, had a pretty solid idea that he never would be, but he wanted it. Whatever Cas offered him, he wanted it. Cas pushed him harder than anyone ever had before, but he also made Dean feel safe. Cas somehow managed to give Dean everything he needed, even before Dean knew he needed it. He was, to use his own words against him, perfect.

Of course, he had to rethink that stance when he found out what choice Cas expected him to make.

“Someone’s getting fucked tonight,” Cas said. The sound of his voice shaping those words didn’t actually make Dean come in his pants, but it felt like a near thing. “Whether that’s me or you is up to you.” Then he turned to start up the stairs like it was nothing, even though Dean knew he had to be hard enough to make it uncomfortable.

Following Cas definitely swayed Dean in a particular direction, and he wondered if that had been Cas’s goal. Did he have a preference, despite leaving it up to Dean? Because watching Cas’s ass clench and release as he made his way up the stairs was enough to reduce Dean to a salivating puddle. It was all he could do not to reach out and grab it right then; he wanted to sink into it, lose himself in the tight heat he was sure was going to haunt his dreams for the rest of his life.

He’d made up his time by the time they reached the room, just to have his temptation swung abruptly in the opposite direction as Cas stripped down. Dean hadn’t forgotten about the size of his thighs, exactly, but seeing them bared reminded him of the morning’s activities, so long ago. Cas pressing him down, straddling his ass to rub off against it—having that power and control driving into him was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.

“Fuck me,” he blurted before Cas could ask for his decision.

Cas studied him, gaze flowing deliberately down Dean’s body then back up to his face. Dean was still fully clothed, if a bit dishevelled, and Cas completely nude; but there was no question who was in charge, despite the imbalance. The scrutiny made him want to hide at the same time as it flushed him with excitement; he had to force himself to keep his chin up and his eyes on Cas’s, and was rewarded by Cas’s lips curling up to match the sparkle of what looked like approval in his eyes.

It gave him the courage he needed to push past his lingering embarrassment to repeat, “If it’s my call, I want you to fuck me. So fucking bad, Cas, you’ve got no idea.”

“You think so?” It occurred to Dean, as Cas tilted his head and cocked an eyebrow, voice dipping impossibly lower, that he may have made a mistake. “You think I have no idea? You think I don’t want you so badly that it drives me to distraction? That I haven’t spent the entire day thinking about how gorgeous you are when you come? Do you really think that it’s not taking all my self control to keep from shoving you face-first into a pillow and __taking you__?”

Throat dry, Dean asked, “Why, uh. Is there anything in particular stopping you from doing that thing you just said?”

“Because when I fuck you, Dean, I’m going to do it properly. Naked, on the bed.”

It took Dean far more time than it should’ve to process that as a command, rather than a description, because Cas’s intonation didn’t change at all. But he just fell silent, watching Dean expectantly, and that was enough for Dean to belatedly put it together. He was so very onboard with that plan.

He’d been pretty ready to go since before they came upstairs, but the way Cas stared at him, focused and not even trying to hide it, cranked his arousal even higher. Cas’s attention, just like pretty much everything else about Cas, was such a turn-on for him. So far all of Cas’s ideas hit on Dean’s kinks with terrifying accuracy, whether he was acting them out or just whispering them hotly into Dean’s ear.

That was a large part of why Dean didn’t question, much less consider objecting, when he sat on the edge of the bed and Cas said, “Lie back near the headboard.”

Once Dean had scooted up the mattress into position with his head propped on the pillows, Cas finally moved. A small part of Dean envied the composure and confidence of his stride as he stalked across the floor completely nude, but mostly he just let himself lay back and enjoy it. The way Cas’s dick bounced as he walked was more mesmerizing than it had any right to be, and when he climbed onto the bed and insinuated himself on his knees between Dean’s legs it rested proudly against the crease of his thigh.

“So,” Dean said when Cas seemed content to stare down at him—not that he really minded, but promises had been made. “What’s involved in getting fucked properly by Castiel Novak?”

His answer came in the form of Cas bending down, hoisting Dean’s legs over his shoulders, and burying his face in Dean’s ass. An absurdly high-pitched noise escaped Dean’s throat at the first long, hot drag of Cas’s tongue up his crack and over his hole, but he didn’t have time to feel awkward about it because Cas just kept going. He licked Dean ceaselessly, across and around, a tease that didn’t push into the ring of muscle but still had his breath coming fast and loud.

Even though it meant craning his neck a little past the point of comfort, Dean couldn’t drag his eyes away from the sight of Cas’s dark hair, all he could see of the man’s face, bobbing between his thighs. Dean’s dick hung in the bottom of his view, fallen back against his stomach and fully in favor of the proceedings, judging by the little bead of clear fluid clinging to the glans.

Cas’s nose had to be mashed uncomfortably against Dean’s perineum, but he didn’t hesitate to nuzzle it deeper, hair brushing Dean’s balls.

“Oh, fuck. Fuck, Cas!”

Pulling away, Cas tilted his face up to look at Dean; his lips and chin were shiny with saliva. Dean had to close his eyes, rolling his head to the side to avert the impending heart attack. But Cas nipped at his inner thigh and said, over Dean’s surprised yelp, “I like when you watch.”

There was no possible way Dean could refuse that. As soon as his eyes were back on Cas, Cas dove back down and really went to town. At last, the tip of his tongue started working itself into Dean, then one of his hands stopped kneading Dean’s ass to wrap around his dick instead, and __damn_ _ he didn’t care if he died anymore.

Cas jacked him slow and soft, not enough to get him off but just enough to drive him slowly mad when combined with Cas fucking his tongue into Dean, sucking at the blood-flushed nerve endings around his rim. It would’ve been so easy to lose himself, but he didn’t want to disappoint Cas. He had to keep his head up and his gaze focused on Cas. He had to concentrate on not letting the slow build of pleasure wring an orgasm out of him; even if it would feel amazing.

Time slipped away from him. The world ceased to exist outside of the space between his legs. His whole life, it seemed, came down to the points where Cas was touching him: the slick of Cas’s tongue inside him, the hypnotic brush of Cas’s hair against his skin, the slide of Cas’s fingers. All that kept him from drifting away completely was the anchor of his attention fixed on Cas.

At some point, Cas slipped back and set him down, but Dean didn’t notice that the dark mop of Cas’s hair was moving closer until his view was overtaken by Cas’s bright blue eyes right in front of his. Cas was kneeling over him, holding himself up with his left arm while his other hand brushed away wetness from Dean’s cheek.

“Okay?” he asked softly.

“Yeah,” Dean answered. His voice wobbled, though he didn’t know when or why he’d started crying. “Yeah, I’m—” A shudder overtook him, somewhere between cold and longing, and he reached up to draw Cas down for a kiss. Cas’s lips were wet and hot, musky with Dean’s own taste, and he gave it all to Dean freely.

When he’d drunk his fill and let Cas go, Dean whispered, “I’m good. I’ll be better if you fuck me.”

Everything after that was the most wonderful blur, slipping through moments of Cas, Cas, Cas. Cas’s fingers, slick with more than just spit. Cas’s body between his thighs, hands tight on Dean’s hips. Cas’s dick pushing into him, Cas’s chest covering his, Cas rocking them together.

Cas pulling him close, after, and kissing him to sleep.

* * *

Sometime before it was light, long before his alarm was going to go off, Dean woke alone. It only disoriented him for one stalled heartbeat, then he felt the heat still hoarded by the empty blanket beside him and heard footsteps coming back from the bathroom. Cas slipped back into bed and Dean rolled over to rest his head on Cas’s chest, a little concerned at the way his heart had dropped so heavily through the floor.

“Two days ago, I’d never even met you,” he said into the dark. Cas stroked his hair and didn’t interrupt. “But I’m gonna miss you so fucking much, Cas.”

“I know. It’s hard to imagine going back to Illinois alone. The world is so connected, but it will never be the same as having you right here, to see and touch. I’m... I’ve never had a partner who—and I do like that word, for us,” Cas added with a touch of amusement. “But I’ll be your boyfriend, if you prefer, or your gentleman caller, significant other, lover, most anything you want to call me. I draw the line at bae.”

Dean had to stifle a laugh against Cas’s skin, then kiss it before promising, “No bae. Partner sounds good to me, too.”

“Thank you.” Hand still moving through Dean’s hair, Cas was silent for so long that Dean thought he might’ve given up on what he’d been saying before. But eventually, voice soft and distant, he continued, “I’ve never had a partner who spent the night in my bed, or let me stay in theirs. I’m going to miss so many things about being close to you, but this—this may be one of the hardest parts for me to give up.”

Despite the warmth that suffused Dean’s chest at the confession, it reminded him of something Cas had said earlier. Two things, actually, at dinner and when they’d come home. Carefully, not wanting to ruin the moment but too concerned to let it go a third time, he asked, “Can I—I have a question for you, and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but you’ve said some things that... Fuck, I don’t know how to say this. I’m sorry. It’s just—you’ve never spent the night, or met someone’s family. You mentioned healthy adult relationships like—like you haven’t had one before?”

Cas’s petting fingers stopped, though they didn’t leave Dean’s head. “My brother was worried, when he figured out I was interested in you just after we’d met. Not for any fault of yours, of course he didn’t know anything about you, but because you’d rescued me. And the last time I mistook gratitude for affection, I spent two years in an illicit relationship with my professor, who wouldn’t acknowledge me publicly or to anyone we knew. It would’ve ruined her career, you see, if it got out that she was dating a student.”

As he resumed scratching Dean’s scalp, Cas said, sadder than Dean had ever heard him, “I’m sure you can figure out the rest. I was young and naive, but I was bright. Showed a lot of potential in the field. I found out she was using me when a year and a half of my research and calculations showed up in a journal under her name.”

“Shit.”

The cruelty of it outraged Dean on multiple levels. For Cas personally, and how betrayed he must have felt. Heartbroken, maybe; it sounded like it, to hear him talk about it even all these years later. But it also angered him professionally, because he hated the thought of one of his peers doing something so far past unethical. Fucking academia.

“Did you report her?”

He could feel Cas’s head shake. “I didn’t want to deal with the fallout. I broke things off, of course, but she had me scared of the repercussions that I could face. I know,” he added when Dean took a breath to protest, “I know now she was full of shit. But I didn’t then, so she got all the credit and the spotlight for my work.”

“What’s her name?” Dean wasn’t sure why it mattered; he just had to know, as if he could someday meet her on the street and denounce her for being a shitty, predatory person.

“April Kelly. I doubt you’ve heard of her,” Cas said viciously. “She received some attention in the field with the article, but faded quickly into obscurity when she couldn’t follow it up with anything of her own. But she could’ve kept her tenure and maybe lured some other poor sap into her bed if she hadn’t tried to extort me.”

Dean sat up, shaking Cas’s hand loose from his head and turning to stare at him as best he could in the dark. “She didn’t.”

“She did. After I got the show and started getting into popular attention a bit, she sent me an email, saying how she wanted to reconnect. I ignored it. But then I came out and more or less sealed my fame—or infamy—and she tried again, more forcefully, threatening to accuse me of sexually harassing her when I was a student, that I’d slept my way through other professors’ classes. I’d only been under contract with Hannah for a few days at that point, but she took care of it. She’s refused to tell me what she did to this day, but April resigned in less than a week and I never heard from her again.”

“I knew I liked Hannah,” Dean muttered as he sank back down to Cas’s chest again. Cas’s arm wrapped around his back, warm and comforting. “That’s all kinds of shitty. I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

“I wouldn’t repeat the experience,” Cas agreed drily. “But it also means I appreciate how different you are—how open with your affection. I’m not glad that you’ll have to deal with the attention now, but your reaction... It meant so much to me. This relationship is nothing like what I had with April, despite Jimmy’s concerns. I know that already, and it’s why I’m not willing to let this go unless and until you want me to. You make me very happy, Dean.”

“Shit, Cas, you too. I mean, you know what I mean. I want this to work, whatever it takes.”

“Then we’ll do it.” Settling deeper into his pillow without dislodging Dean, Cas cupped Dean’s cheek in his free hand and pressed their lips together tenderly. “Whatever it takes.”


	7. Saiph

“You know, most people are _less_ uptight after they get laid.”

Cas didn’t look up from the papers arrayed over his desk, red pen slashing viciously through a ridiculously anthropomorphized explanation of black holes. The new rotating exhibit may have been meant for children, but he wouldn’t tolerate infantilizing them at the expense of genuine scientific education. Black holes were not _hungry_.

“My trash can is in the hallway. You can take it from there, empty it, and leave it there without disturbing me. That’s the reason I went through the trouble of putting it in the hallway instead of leaving it my office.”

“See, that’s just the shit I’m talking about.”

“Gabe, I’m very busy—”

“Yeah, being a dick. To literally everyone in this building.”

With an exasperated sigh, Cas tore himself away from another edit to glare at Gabriel. The janitor leaned against the door, backlit by the bright fluorescents of the hallway compared to the softer but warmer glow of Cas’s desk lamp. He raised a bright red lollipop to point accusingly at Cas’s face when he had his attention.

“See, you’re only even bothering with me now because you wanna be pedantic about my use of the word _literally_. Go on, tell me I’m wrong.”

Since Cas couldn’t, he grimaced and lowered his pen. “What do you want, Gabriel?”

“World peace. A couple million dollars. Two or three super hot babes waiting at home to cater to my every whim.” He stuck the lollipop in his mouth and grinned around it, well aware of how he was trying Cas’s patience. “My favorite jackass astrophysicist to stop terrorizing his colleagues just because he misses his bae.”

About to call Gabe on his hypocrisy, Cas stopped short and narrowed his eyes. The particular choice of imbecilic endearment raised his suspicions, but it was likely a coincidence—or else Cas had mentioned his dislike of the term in Gabe’s presence at some point. While Gabe was absolutely the type to track Dean down and try to wheedle details out of him, Dean would’ve told Cas about the attempt. Which brought him back to the point he’d originally intended to make.

“ _I’m_ terrorizing my colleagues? You spend so much of your day fucking with the staff here that it’s a wonder the planetarium isn’t knee deep in old gum.”

“Hey!” Gabe’s offended look was quite convincing for being entirely faked. “First of all, that’s called efficiency. I can do both, I’m just that good. And secondly, yeah. Which should tell you how much of an asshole you’re being, because people are coming to _me_ about it.”

If true, that was a fairly compelling argument. Cas and Gabe weren’t close friends, but they spent enough time together for it to be remarkable; Cas wasn’t exactly a sociable sort when it wasn’t required of him, and there was no professional reason for them to interact as much as they did. Sometime through the years Gabe had given up on winning a reaction from Cas with his endless repertoire of pranks and instead started inserting himself into Cas’s office for lunch at least twice a week.

Usually, people came to Cas under the mistaken impression that he had any sway to rein in Gabe’s idea of fun. For that to be reversed, if his colleagues were seeking out Gabe to complain about Cas’s behavior, that probably meant Cas had crossed a line. Or possibly a few lines.

He capped his pen and set it down, leaning back in his chair to give Gabe his open and undivided attention. “How bad is it?”

Gabe stopped propping himself against the door and actually came in, closing it behind him, which wasn’t a good sign. Cas usually kept a stack of textbooks in what was meant to be the visitor’s chair to discourage actual visitors. Gabe, in turn, usually gave him grief about it and then dumped them and ceremoniously on the floor. When he instead lifted them and placed them carefully at the corner of Cas’s desk, that was another bad sign.

“Balthazar keeps joking about buying Dean a plane ticket and locking him in your basement once he gets here, only I don’t think he’s joking anymore. Hael is one snarky remark away from filing an HR complaint. She knows it won’t do any good, since you’re the second coming of asshole astronomy Jesus, but she’s that sick of you. Ephraim is crying in the closet, in _my_ supply closet, because you told him,”—and here Gabe put on an extremely unflattering impression of Cas’s voice, dropping his tone to a barely articulate rasp—“his thesis topic is no more scientific than syndicated newspaper astrology.”

Cas scowled. “Maybe I should have phrased it more diplomatically, but he should consider—”

“You should consider,” Gabe said over him, “that he’s been working on that thesis for two years. With your approval, because he’s here on a fellowship you funded!”

“He doesn’t know that.”

Hands thrown up in overdramatic frustration, Gabe cried, “How does that make it any better! Kid idolizes you, which, yeah, means he’s a bit of an idiot, but he’s the kind of science nerd idiot you usually tolerate pretty well. Now he thinks you hate him. So he’s snotting out his feelings in, once again, _my closet._ ”

“That’s the only reason you care, isn’t it.”

“That’s seventy percent of why I care,” Gabe corrected. “I give about five percent of a shit about his feelings, ’cause he’s a good kid and still hasn’t learned not to drink the coffee I bring him. Ten percent of me wants people to stop being miserable because of you so that I don’t feel guilty fucking with them. The other whatever percent—”

Cas couldn’t stop himself from interjecting, “Fifteen.” Granted, he didn’t try particularly hard.

“—wants you back to your usual levels of grumpiness because you’re bumming me out and no one else in this building actually likes me. Except Ephraim, I guess. Sometimes. But, in case you’re too busy sulking to remember, he’s currently—”

“Crying in your closet.” Cas sighed.

He hadn’t been in the best mood since leaving Kansas two weeks before, he knew that. He wasn’t sleeping well, he’d had another argument with his well-meaning but condescending twin brother that they still hadn’t reconciled from, and despite exchanging texts, calls, and video chats with Dean almost constantly, he missed him. They’d developed such a profound bond that even now, when they’d been apart significantly longer than they’d been together, it felt like something was missing in his chest.

But even though he felt like a lovesick adolescent—as he understood the phenomenon; he’d been focused on his studies and more or less skipped it during that period of his own life—he hadn’t meant to act like a surly teenager because of it. Not that he ever made much effort to rein in his surliness, but he generally prided himself on being a more mature class of asshole.

He disliked the uncontrolled aspect of it, as well. Rudeness was a choice he made when and because it suited him, but he was usually self-aware enough to know when he was making it. He didn’t like being a poor judge of his own actions, nor letting his emotions dictate them without his input. That was going to have to change.

“Okay,” he acknowledged. “My behavior has been less than ideal. I’ll make amends and try to be less of a jackass to my colleagues in the future.”

“Uh huh.” Gabe wore an expression that combined judgment and skepticism in a way he must have mastered early in life. “And that’s that, is it?”

Clearly Gabe didn’t think so. Equally clearly, he wanted Cas to conclude or guess at what else there was. But while Cas didn’t have the patience for that game, he did have significantly more patience in general; he waited out Gabe’s objection with raised eyebrows and a blank face.

Sure enough, after barely any time, Gabe rolled his eyes and muttered, “Jesus tittyfucking Christ. The things I do in the name of friendship with grumpy nerds. I didn’t think I would have to explain this to one of America’s greatest scientific minds, but I guess there has to be a trade-off. Castiel Sassafras Novak, you’re acting like a miserable bastard because you are currently a miserable bastard.”

“I was aware of that particular fact, thank you, Gabriel.”

Gabe ignored his scathing tone, which was another specialty of his and a large part of the reason that their unlikely friendship worked. “And what are you planning to do about it?”

He could’ve sworn they’d just addressed that. “I’m going to stop acting like a miserable bastard.”

Burying his face in his hands, Gabe sighed. “I like you, Cas, I do. But do you have to be intolerably dense _all_ the time? I’m not asking for much here, just like an hour break from it.”

Cas stared at him with the blankest expression at his disposal. It took Gabe several seconds to look up and notice it, but when he did, Cas had to duck a flying lollipop. “You know you’re the one who ought to be stuck cleaning that up,” he pointed out as it shattered against the wall behind him.

“Stop being miserable, you stubborn fucking asshole.” Despite the violence of his words and actions, Gabe didn’t sound angry. Most likely he wasn’t, really; there was very little in life that Gabe took seriously enough to get mad over, and Cas’s moods didn’t make the cut. “That’s all you’ve got to do.”

“Easy as that, is it?”

“Easy as that.”

* * *

“Hey, sweetheart.”

“I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“Nah.” The pixelated image of Dean on Cas’s screen stretched and scratched at a shoulder covered by a soft-looking gray t-shirt. “I was just going over my slides for tomorrow.”

Cas glanced up at the clock in the corner with his eyebrows raised. “At eleven oh-six at night?”

“What, like you have a monopoly on working stupidly late? Don’t think I don’t know that you just got home, Doctor Novak.”

“Yes, well.” Running a hand through his hair, Cass slumped back in his chair. “I was ready to leave an hour before I did, but I had to spend that long coaxing our graduate intern out of the closet.”

Eyes wide, Dean said, “You... don’t mean metaphorically, do you.” It wasn’t quite a question.

“No,” Cas agreed. “A very real closet.”

“And you had to coax him out of it because...?”

Cas sighed again and spared a moment to be grateful that Dean already knew and liked him for the ornery jackass he was. “He was in there crying because I was mean to him.”

When Dean laughed, he laughed with his whole body. His eyes crinkled almost closed, his shoulders shook back and forth with his head, his hand went up to his mouth as if to hide his smile but never quite made it there. But over the internet connection and video software, Cas couldn’t see the fine lines that edged around Dean’s eyes. The picture and audio didn’t sync quite right, and the sound quality from his laptop speakers turned Dean’s laugh into a distant, tinny thing.

He wanted to be able to see that laugh in person, to reach out and touch the lips that Dean’s fingertips teased. Two nights with Dean; insignificant astronomically speaking, barely anything even on the massively smaller scale of his own life. Every time he thought about that, and he found himself going back to it frequently, he had trouble reconciling how vital it felt to have Dean in his life now.

But vital Dean was, and Cas refused to let himself feel foolish for it. The same rational part of him that found it troubling to have developed such strong feelings in so short a time also told him not to not to get carried away with needless, baseless doubts. He and Dean had stumbled upon a good thing, no matter how improbable, and he was going to accept the happiness that brought him. Embrace it, even.

“What did you do, you monster?” Dean asked once he’d recovered enough.

“I may have disparaged his thesis.”

“Oh man, that’s harsh. Did the kid or his thesis deserve it?”

“No,” he admitted. “I’ve been out of sorts lately, for some reason, and taking it out on my colleagues more than is forgivable.”

Dean’s eyes went soft and understanding even over the low resolution connection as he echoed, “For some reason. I miss you too, Cas.”

Slumping in his desk chair, Cas said, “I enjoy the time we’re able to spend together, and I know I should be grateful for the technology that allows us to share it. I am. But it’s still frustrating to be so physically distant.”

As Dean grinned slow and sideways at him, Cas felt the mood shift drastically. It was a very welcome change from the guiltily morose feeling he’d had since talking to Gabe, one that made him sit up and take notice.

“I know what you mean,” Dean said without a trace of shame. “I’m pretty frustrated at the physical side of things myself.”

“Anything in particular?”

Dean rolled his eyes. “I give you that beautiful innuendo, and you’re going to make me say it?”

“Yes.”

He wouldn’t tease too much, though. Not when they both needed the connection of shared orgasms as badly as they did. It had been a few days—almost a full week, actually—since they’d last had enough time to do anything like this together. Texts and pictures had been exchanged, but being able to do it live took a certain amount of coordination between their schedules that they didn’t always have. He was glad Dean had initiated it, since he might not have done so himself at the late hour and in his melancholy mood. But with the offer on the table, it wouldn’t take long for him to be ready to perform.

Dean had that effect on him, especially when he leaned in close to the screen and said, “I mean, everything, really. But I think I miss your mouth the most. The way you kiss me, your lips on my neck, the bruised bite marks that are all totally gone now. Fuck, baby, I haven’t had a blowjob in weeks.”

Voice placid with false indifference, Cas said, “I don’t think I can do that for you over the computer, unfortunately. Science still has quite a ways to go to make that work.”

“I’m sure you can come up with something to tide us over, smart man like you.”

Cas echoed Dean’s wicked smile, stretching it further when Dean reacted with a blush that turned his smirk shy and endearing. “Remind me what I have to work with and I’ll see what I can do.”

Since his study wasn’t the best place for that sort of recreational activity, with its hard wooden chair and lack of useful supplies, he decided to relocate. Making sure to keep the laptop screen tilted and in his sight, he lifted it from the desk to head upstairs. He barely took his eyes off to watch where he stepped, not wanting to miss a moment of Dean’s little striptease.

He made to his bed just in time to have nothing distracting him away from Dean’s last move, which was to turn away from the camera and bend nearly all the way over to take down his underwear. As was no doubt Dean’s intention, it gave Cas a phenomenal view of his ass. What he really wanted was to get his hands on the muscular cheeks, and maybe his face between them again for as long as Dean could stand it, but seeing them tense as Dean lifted his feet one at a time and then straightened back up was a damn good consolation prize.

When Dean spun to face him, his cock was full and swayed temptingly with the momentum. Cas would have liked to get his mouth on that again, too; Dean was beautifully reactive. But he could wring those responses from Dean without touching him, too, and that was exactly what he planned to do.

“Gorgeous,” he said to see the flush travel down Dean’s chest. “Now, I’m going to get ready. Can you touch yourself while you watch me? I’d like that, knowing you were making yourself feel good. Will you? Get comfortable on the bed however you like, just try to arrange it so I can see your face.”

Surprisingly, Dean’s face fell into uncertainty instead of excitement. Cas had been so sure Dean would like the suggestion, based on things they’d done before in person and long-distance. He was disappointed to be wrong, but before he could reassure Dean and come up with an alternative, Dean voiced an entirely different concern than he’d been expecting.

“Are you sure you want to do this? I just mean,” he clarified as Cas frowned, “there are, you know, risks. Most of the attention has died down, but that just means the sketchy desperate ones have moved in. I got like three offers this week to sell my story to some shitty magazine or another. If someone really wants to, you could be in the news as the next leaked celebrity sex tape.”

Cas shrugged one shoulder and settled more comfortably on the bed, head propped on one hand so he could make digital eye contact with Dean. “If it happens, Hannah will throw a fit and yell at me for about five minutes, then file a copyright suit for any profits made and statutory damages. You know I don’t mind a bit of notoriety, but if you do—”

“Hell no,” Dean broke in. “This is firmly in _worth it_ territory for me. I’m tenured, I’m out, I have nothing to be ashamed of. I don’t exactly want my sex life publicized, but I mean, come on. Showing up with you, everyone seeing me turning you on, would be a huge fucking ego boost. Have you seen yourself?”

Warmth spread all through Cas’s chest at the quick and vehement assertion. He already knew Dean wasn’t April in so many ways, but reminders never went astray. “I’m glad. You, us—it’s worth it for me, too. I really don’t care so much for my own privacy anyway, but even if I did I’d never be ashamed of people knowing I find you irresistibly appealing. Though I think my brother would be mortified.”

That was a significant understatement; Jimmy would kill him.

“But I wouldn’t especially like people seeing a recording of the things you do for me. I’m a selfish man, Dean. I don’t want to share you.”

When Dean said, “I’m okay with that. The, uh, not sharing,” his voice cracked just enough to be gratifying. Cas took it as his cue to get back to what they’d been doing.

“Would you like me to take my clothes off now, Dean?”

“Oh fuck yes.” Dean swayed slightly on his feet, then seemed to remember what Cas had asked of him earlier and said, “Let me just—” The screen spun dizzyingly as Dean picked up his laptop and dropped it and himself on his bed.

Cas remembered that bed very fondly; he wished yet again that he could be in it now, with Dean, instead of in his own lonely queen. But then Dean reappeared, his chest stretched sideways across Cas’s view and his sweetly smiling face just at the edge of the screen. He was laying in mirror to Cas, propped up on one elbow so he could see his computer.

“Is this okay?”

“It’s perfect.”

The image cut Dean off just above the navel, where light hairs started to wisp out from the skin. Further down, Cas knew, they’d grow denser and darker into a thick patch of pubic hair, but he couldn’t see that or the cock it surrounded. He didn’t need to, this time. He wanted to see Dean’s face more than anything else: the way he flushed and bit his lip, how his eyes fluttered when he wanted to keep them open but pleasure wanted to draw them closed.

“Go on,” urged Cas.

Dean didn’t need any more encouragement. The arm not holding him up crossed partway over his chest and started up a distinctive enough movement that it didn’t matter that Cas couldn’t see it. He could picture the play of Dean’s fingers over his cock, his grip light, his hand sliding only an inch or two up the shaft before stroking back down to the base. Working himself up, but not too far. It was only the appetizer, after all.

Standing, Cas made quick work of removing his clothes in front of the camera. He didn’t keep his eyes on Dean the whole time, because he was trying to be efficient—he had more elaborate plans for his time with Dean than making him jerk off to Cas getting naked. But in the moments when he did glance over, Dean’s rapt attention and wide eyes made arousal pool hot and heavy inside him.

“God,” Dean groaned, “I wanna touch you so bad, sweetheart. Fuckin’ look at you.”

Cas promised, “I’ll give you something to look at,” and ducked into his closet. The box in one corner had what he needed in easy reach, so he was already standing again as Dean complained, “Hey, that’s the opposite of something to look at!”

The protest died away as soon as Cas held up his prizes: a bottle of lube and a modestly sized dildo. It wasn’t anything fancy, realistic in design and a few shades lighter than Cas’s own skin tone, but his tastes tended to the simple there. It just had to do what he needed it to do—get him off—and not make him feel completely ridiculous shoving it into his ass. That ruled out the glittery pink unicorn horn he’d seen last time he browsed for new sex toys.

Though it might need to make an appearance in Dean’s ass, because that image wasn’t ridiculous at all... But that was a thought for another time.

“I thought you might like to look at this,” Cas explained as he settled himself back on the bed, though not in the same position as he had been. He lay instead on his back, supporting his head and neck on a few pillows so that he could comfortably look down his body to the laptop between his legs. Knees bent and spread to expose everything to Dean, who had watched the process silently, he asked, “Was I right?”

“You know you were, you smug son of a bitch.” The breathy fondness in Dean’s voice smoothed out his grumpy words. It was true, too; even if Cas hadn’t known well before he proposed the idea, Dean’s shiny wet lips and blush-pink chest would have given him away. “God, you look good enough to eat.”

That was another fantastic idea, and one that Cas could spin nicely to his purposes. “We could do that.”

He put the dildo down on the sheets, nudging against his thigh where Dean could see it and be reminded of its purpose, and popped the cap of the lube. It flowed thick onto his palm and fingers, cool slickness ready to be eased into him. Before working himself open for the dildo, though, he teased a finger around his hole, left it wet and glistening for Dean to see.

“I’ll lay back just like this and let you do all the work. You know I like it slow to start, I’d want you to lick me so soft, sweet like I know you can. No pressure, not trying to push inside, just licking me, right there, over and over...”

He stroked one finger over himself demonstratively and Dean followed each pass with hungry eyes and a darting tongue. Much as Cas wanted that tongue, and he really did want it very badly, what he had felt nice, too. The lube was silken and viscous, and the soft touch of his fingertip set his sensitive nerves glowing delightfully as he started to glide it in circles around the tight ring.

“Mm, yes,” he said, more of a sigh than a word. “Just like that.”

Hand speeding up, Dean nodded eagerly. “I would. Fuck, Cas, I’d be so nice to you. If you just let me taste you, I’d be so gentle, I swear, as much as you need.”

“I know you would. You’re always so good for me, Dean. You make me feel amazing. And you’d be so perfect for me, you’d give me just what I needed. Even if it took hours, even if your jaw was aching and you couldn’t feel your tongue at all, you’d keep going for me, wouldn’t you? If that was what I needed?”

“Yes!” Dean’s head fell forward onto his chest as his lower body shoved forward—fucking into his hand now, instead of just jerking himself off. Then his eyes snapped open again and he stilled, saying, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“Shh,” Cas broke in, quiet but firm. “It’s fine. You’re fine. I told you to make yourself feel good, I want you to do whatever makes that happen. You don’t have to wait for me or my permission, just let me see you. I want to see you getting off on this, Dean. Let me watch how much it excites you to think of your mouth on me. Because it excites me, too.”

Ready for more, Cas finally pushed his fingertip in, still slick enough for comfort, pressing until muscle yielded and he dipped into his own heat with a gasp. He kept going, bearing down to pull the finger most of the way inside himself so that Dean could see it swallowed past both knuckles.

He left it there, adjusting and enjoying the way Dean’s lips pursed like an inordinately pornographic reflection of Cas’s own pucker opening. “And when you’re finally inside, you’ll be just as thorough there. Fuck me so deep with your tongue, and by then you’ll have me so sensitive down there that I’ll feel every little twitch.”

“God, yes.”

When Dean started to hump his fist again he didn’t stop himself, though he did make an effort to keep his head up and his eyes on Cas on the computer. And it was clearly an effort, judging by the way they fluttered shut and then sprang open on more than one occasion.

“And the whole time I’ll just be lying there, getting my pleasure from you without having to do anything myself.” Cas worked his finger out and back in, all the way, twisting a little both ways to loosen things up. “Maybe I’ll help out a bit and throw a leg over your shoulder to make it easier, but maybe I won’t. I’ll just let myself melt into relaxed bliss.”

As he started in with a second finger, Cas asked, “Or are you more into the _sit on my face until I can’t breathe anything but you_ kind of rimming?”

“Yes!” Dean’s whole body tensed with a spasm so violent that Cas thought for a moment he was coming. But he just redoubled his desperate movements, begged, “Oh fuck, yes, both, either, please. Fuck yourself, baby, won’t you please fuck yourself for me? I wanna see it before I come and I’m not gonna make it much longer.”

“Yes. Yes, fuck, of course I will.”

How could he say no to a request like that? He didn’t want to. Giving Dean what he needed was the only reason Cas existed in moments like these, his body and his mind all waiting on a cue for how he could bring Dean greater pleasure, what he could do or say to reward Dean’s eager trust. And, as was often the case with these things, Cas needed it just as badly as Dean.

Cas was already pulling out his fingers and groping for the dildo as he said, “Anything, Dean. For you, I’d do absolutely anything. It’s frankly absurd, I—”

He cut himself off before he could ramble all the fond nonsense that wanted to spill off his tongue. It wasn’t the time or place for that discussion, with the blunt tip of a silicone cock pushed against his hole and Dean’s eyes frantic as he gasped through an endless chant of Cas’s name and _fuck_ and _yeah_. In that moment, it was time for other words.

“Do you feel good, Dean?” he asked. The head of the dildo stretched him open, smooth and easy. He rocked his hips up, taking it deeper and showing off the clench of his thigh and ass muscles. “Are you imagining it’s me around you instead of your hand? Fucking into me for the first time?”

Dean let out a long, low moan. “Shit, Cas, yeah. So good.” He rolled onto his back and his arm jerked rapidly, the slick sound of his hand on his cock speeding up beneath his uneven breaths.

And because he was so sweet, so good for Cas, he remembered even at the height of his pleasure to turn his head back towards the camera to let Cas see how he bit his lip whenever his mouth wasn’t open in a needy pant. The way his red cheeks didn’t make his constellations of freckles any less noticeable. Like that, Cas had a perfect view of Dean’s lips forming his name as Dean thrust up into his fist and came.

“Look at you.” Cas’s voice came out too soft, a sweetness meant to be breathed into a lover’s ear and not picked up by a microphone. So he said it again, louder and deeper, “Look at you, Dean. Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?”

Cas wanted—needed—to follow him into orgasm, so he skipped over the long, slow drags of the dildo inside him that he usually favored to draw things out and work himself up to an irresistible urge to climax. He was already there, already desperate, and he knew it wouldn’t take long before the combination of hard thrusts over his prostate and his hand working at his cock would get him off. Especially with Dean watching him, sated and warm.

* * *

Dean wiped off with a couple of tissues after, but Cas needed a shower.

“Goodnight, Dean. Sleep well, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow?”

“Yeah.” With a sleepy blink, Dean settled onto his pillow; his head popped up again a moment later. “Oh, hey—you remember Sam’s coming to stay for a few days, right?”

“Yes. Does that mean you won’t be available tomorrow night?”

Cas tried to keep the pang of sorrow he felt out of his demeanor, but suspected he wasn’t successful as Dean hastened assure him, “No, sweetheart, of course not! I was just wondering if you wanted to meet him? He’s a huge nerd, you know, big fan. He’d flip out.”

“Right. _He’s_ the nerdy fan, and you’re the cool one who didn’t flip out at all when you met me.”

“Right!” Dean’s smile flashed cheekily at him. “I was super cool and smooth, which is how I got you in my house and my bed. Sam doesn’t have that kinda game.”

“Of course I’d love to meet your brother, Dean. Your brother, your parents, your cousin—everyone. Anyone who’s important to you. Anyone you want me to meet.”

“I want you to meet everyone,” Dean said, then his face cracked open into a yawn.

“Go to sleep,” Cas told him. “I’ll be back late tomorrow, but not this late. Dinner with Jimmy and Amelia.”

Dean’s head fell into his pillow again and he shifted until he was comfortable. “You two done fighting?”

“Not yet, but we will be. Sleep.”

“You too, baby. The scruffy disheveled look is hot, but I don’t want you making your intern cry again because you’re sleep deprived and grumpy. Night, sweetheart.”

“Goodnight, Dean.”

Dean didn’t shut his laptop, so Cas got to watch him drift off to a peaceful sleep. He’d probably notice the next day how long it took Cas to disconnect and call him creepy, but he wouldn’t really mind. Even though Cas needed to rinse off and get himself ready for bed, he couldn’t help lingering on the sight just a little longer.

But eventually he had to close out the program on Dean’s dark room and his restful face, painted gray and blue by the light from the monitor. He had a long day ahead of him, but at least he had Dean and Sam’s virtual company to look forward to at the end of it.

He’d come to a decision on Gabe’s advice, but it wasn’t going to be easy, and Jimmy wasn’t going to like it.


	8. Vega

Dean felt unexpectedly anxious as he made his way east toward Kansas City to pick up Sam from the airport. It was just after two, the lunch rush mostly passed and quitting time rush hour not yet started, so he only had a few cars and a good handful of trucks for company on the interstate. It made for a nice drive, he could appreciate a stretch of mostly open road as much as the next guy, but it also meant he didn’t have a lot of distraction from his thoughts.

Interest in him as _Castiel Novak’s New Gay Lover!?_ had died down pretty quickly in Lawrence. It wasn’t actually enough of a scandal, either for celebrities in general or Cas in particular, for anyone to put more than a cursory effort into it. And staying in Lawrence, an objectively boring town, just to stalk Dean, an objectively boring man, didn’t seem to have much appeal after the first couple days. Aside from the increasingly infrequent emails and calls he’d mentioned to Cas, nobody was really bothering him. His neighbors were still his neighbors, people on the street didn’t call him out, and his students had learned that as happy as Professor Winchester was to talk about his side projects or brag about his brother, questions about that aspect of his personal life would be met with a smile with a blank wall behind it.

But Kansas City wasn’t Lawrence, and KCI was always bustling. There was more potential for something to happen there. At the same time as Dean worried about that—getting caught out unexpectedly when all he wanted to do was pick his little brother up from his flight and doing something that embarrassed him and Cas both—he also wondered if that wasn’t a self-important fear. He really wasn’t trying to be egotistical or anything. _He_ didn’t think he’d done anything to warrant the attention, and he definitely didn’t want it, but being on the edge of a spotlight was totally new territory for him.

Maybe he’d just wait in the car and Sam could—no. No, he wasn’t doing that. He was gonna go in there and hug his stupidly tall brother as soon as he got out out of the secured area, and he was going to prove—even if only to himself—that he hadn’t been lying when he told Cas it was worth it. Sure, he was nervous about getting cornered and harassed, but he wasn’t terrified. And even if he had been, he wasn’t such a coward that he’d let it stop him from living his life. He was on his way to see one of the most important people in that life, and anyone who wanted to get in his way because of one the other most important people could fuck right off.

All that psyching himself out ended up being for nothing. No one gave him so much as a second glance as he waited, even though he couldn’t stop bouncing on his heels impatiently. Sam being on a plane was better than him being on a plane, but he’d still feel better when it landed and Sam was safe on Kansas ground where he belonged (no matter how well California had been treating him for the past decade).

He thought he had all potential paths covered, but Sam surprised him from the side, wrapping an arm around him and exclaiming, “Dean!” right in his ear at a low bellow.

Laughing, Dean spun around and dragged Sam into a grip that was half hug, half headlock. “Sammy! God, when did you get so old? Is that gray hair I see?”

Sam shoved at him, but he was laughing too. “Shut up, it’s barely been a year since the last time I was out here. And you could come to Cali sometime, you know.”

“Yeah, but why would I do that when I’d just have to drag the entire family with me. They’d bitch endlessly if I didn’t, at both of us, and who the hell wants to spend that many hours in a car with Rufus?”

Despite that being the absolute truth, Sam had the gall to eye Dean disbelievingly. “Right. It has nothing to do with your crippling fear of flying.”

“I still say it’s not too late to send you back to the baby brother factory,” Dean told him instead of answering that accusation. “Come on, did you check a bag?”

He hadn’t, so they got to skip the quagmire of claims and head straight for Dean’s car. They fought over the radio more out of habit than anything, but Sam gave up after his third attempt to switch over from the Metallica CD while Dean was distracted with a turn got his arm smacked. For almost a full verse, Dean got to enjoy _Nothing Else Matters_. Then Sam asked, “He’s not there, is he?”

“What?”

“Castiel Novak. You would’ve told me if he was at your house. You wouldn’t just, like, spring that on me to be a dick.”

That stung a bit. Not the accusation—Dean totally would’ve done that, if it had been a possibility. But it wasn’t, because Cas was in Illinois and Dean’s house was in Kansas. Taken separately, those were just two relatively neutral facts. Together, they made for a reality that left an ache in Dean’s chest.

“Nah. He’s not there.”

Sam must have heard the melancholy behind Dean’s answer, because his teasing fell away and in its place was brotherly concern. “Sorry, I shouldn’t—you know how hard it was for me when Eileen went away that first summer.”

“Yeah.”

Eileen and Sam had met at school, and she always spent her summers with her extended family in Ireland. Sam had fallen for her quickly, but he’d only just stopped being an awkward nerd enough to establish that the interest was mutual by the time the year was over and she had to go back to Ireland. There had been a lot of moping and pining over the months before she came back.

Dean shrugged, not wanting to get bogged down in comparing their situations because it only reminded him how much was working against him and Cas. Eileen was always planning to come back; they were friends first; she wasn’t internationally famous. They’d also been younger and less established in their lives.

“It sucks,” he agreed. “But we’re both stubborn assholes when we want something, so we’re making it work.”

He didn’t add that he wasn’t sure how long it would work for. Sam probably knew that. They’d been in different states for longer than they’d been in the same one by a significant degree, and while Dean wasn’t planning to call it quits any time soon, he was a very physical person when it came to his relationships. He was tactile—with friends, family, and lovers—and missing those casual touches grated on him just as much as the intimate ones he longed for.

Sam clapped him on the shoulder, breaking him out of his maudlin thoughts. “That’s the spirit. I’m happy for you, Dean. Even if it’ll never stop being unreal to me that you’re dating Castiel Novak.”

“Me too, Sammy. Me too.”

* * *

Cas looked better when he called in that night; still tired, but less worn down by it. He was smiling when he came into view, even before his eyes dropped to where Dean appeared on his screen; it wasn’t just an affectation he was putting on for Dean’s sake. Not that Cas was really the type to do that anyway, but seeing how stressed he’d been made their already difficult separation even harder. Something he’d done that day, whether it was the conversation with Jimmy or not, had taken a load off him.

“How’d your day go?” he asked. It never hurt to be sure; maybe there was something in particular Cas wanted to talk about. And Cas always appreciated being asked.

He saw that gratitude in the widening of Cas’s smile, the settling of his shoulders, the crinkle of laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. Dean wanted to brush those with his thumb and press kisses against them until he could feel the wrinkles deepen beneath his lips. Since that was out of the question, and thinking about it would just make him broody again, he shrugged off the pang and returned Cas’s smile.

“Much better than yesterday,” Cas confirmed. “And things with Jimmy worked out better than I thought they would, too.”

“I told you. He’s your brother, Cas. He’s gonna love you no matter how much you piss him off.”

Cas’s face did something complicated at that, but it ended on a soft laugh. “Speaking of brothers—Sam’s there?”

Dean didn’t care how stupid the grin splitting his face looked. It had been way too long since he’d seen Sammy in person, and he missed the nerd a lot. He’d long ago forgiven his little brother for leaving—unlike Dean, who’d stayed in Lawrence for college and grad school. When Sam left for Stanford, Dean had taken it pretty hard, felt like he wasn’t enough to keep Sam around. God, he’d been self-centered and insecure.

“Yeah. It’s great having him back for a while, though I wish Eileen had been able to come, too. It sucks that they live so far, you know?”

“It’s not an insurmountable distance,” Cas pointed out. “Not one that needs to drive you apart. You still talk most days, you can visit each other without too much trouble.”

It didn’t sound like he was talking about Dean anymore, but it was a familiar argument. Just because he’d lived in Lawrence his whole life, that didn’t mean it worked for everyone. Cas still lived in Illinois, but he went on a lot of trips for work and publicity. Did he think Dean was uninteresting for sticking around his hometown for so long?

Was he ready to leave Kansas for Cas? He wanted to be.

He wasn’t.

He loved his life in Lawrence, everything he’d been able to build and achieve. He needed his family around. Everything was perfect, except for the fact that Cas wasn’t there. But they had time to work out a solution. They were in early days still, regardless of how intense everything had started and stayed.

Leaning in to make sure Cas could see his raised eyebrows to the best of his webcam’s ability to transmit them, Dean said, “Sounds like you’ve been practicing that justification.”

“The topic has come up more than once. And now Claire’s starting to talk about colleges, maybe even matriculating as a junior, and her interests are mostly on the west coast.”

“Jimmy’s taking it hard?”

“Very.”

Dean could sympathize with that. “Is that what you were fighting about?”

“No. I’m encouraging her, and I’m not sorry for it, but he wants what’s best for her. Honestly, her being this excited about college is a happy surprise for everyone. He’s just worried about feeling abandoned.”

“Yeah, I get that. I mean, I don’t have a kid, obviously, but I was sore for a while when Sammy did the same thing.”

“Where is Sam?” Cas asked, and Dean had to laugh.

“That’s the second time you’ve changed the subject to my brother. Should I be jealous?”

“Won’t know until I meet him,” Cas answered with a grin Dean recognized.

It was his little shit grin, which would look like a smirk on anyone else’s face, but lit up Cas’s entire expression when he knew he was being a jackass and delighting in it. Dean mostly saw it when Cas was teasing him in private (and often involving his privates). The rest of the time, Cas was a professional at being a jackass with a straight face; that was the reason no one believed what an ornery dick he was until they met him in person.

He just grinned back. “Sammy!” he bellowed without moving back from the microphone at all. “Sam! He’s upstairs,” he explained to Cas’s suddenly unimpressed expression.

Sam came thundering down the stairs, demanding, “What, Dean?” His tone and the ratty flannel he was wearing as a sleeping shirt suggested he had no idea why Dean had called him down, and the way he squeaked when Cas greeted him from the laptop confirmed it.

It took Dean a long time to stop laughing long enough to introduce them properly. Sam glared nervously at him the entire time, perched on the very edge of the couch cushion where the laptop couldn’t see him until Dean waved him closer and said, “Cas, this is Sam. Sam, Cas.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sam.”

“You too, Dr. Novak!”

Yeah, no. Dean got being starstruck, he did, but he didn’t need Sam to be weird about it. Cas wasn’t _Dr. Novak_ , he was _Cas_. Dean’s Cas, who might have been ridiculously famous, but that was the least interesting thing about him. He saw Cas shifting, preparing to correct the title, but it wouldn’t be enough to make Sam knock off the awkwardness.

So Dean preempted him. “He blew me on this very couch, Sammy. You can call him Cas after that.”

Cas raised an eyebrow at him as Sam sputtered, but Dean knew his brother. As soon as he recovered, Sam leaned past Dean to ask, “What do you see in this guy, seriously?” without any more awe than he’d asked the same of Dean’s previous partners.

Unlike any of them, who had said sweet and flattering things about his intelligence and sense of humor and kindness, Cas didn’t even take a second to think before answering, “Well, the sex is fantastic—”

Whatever else Cas said, Dean couldn’t hear it over his own laughter. Cas’s blithe answer surprised him—though it probably shouldn’t have—but more than that, his own reaction to it was unexpected. He didn’t suffer even a moment of doubt, of worrying Cas was hiding the truth behind a joke. Because when they were alone, and he wasn’t feeding into Dean's brotherly desire for mischief, Cas wouldn’t freaking shut up about all the things he liked about Dean.

It flustered the hell out of him every time, and when it was sexual—not infrequent—well. Dean had known he got off on praise, but he hadn’t known just how hard he got off on it until Cas came along. Maybe it should’ve been embarrassing, but he found it hard to care when it felt so good in the moment. And if it helped ease the insecurity that always plagued him in relationships, told him he couldn’t believe the promises people made because there was no way he was enough—that would’ve been worth it even without the kinky bonus.

He loved that Cas did that for him without Dean needing to ask or explain; that Cas seemed to get just as much out of it as he did. He loved how easy it was to trust Cas, who never went too far even when he was teasing Dean to the very bounds of his sanity. He loved the open way Cas talked about things, from the mundane to the most personal and painful. He loved—Cas.

He loved Cas.

As far as epiphanies went, that wasn’t really much of a shock. A bit fast, maybe, but that had worked for them so far. He wasn’t even nervous about admitting it to Cas, even if Cas didn’t feel the same. Would it suck? Yeah, absolutely. But Cas wouldn’t be a dick about it. If he didn’t think it was a possibility, he’d tell Dean and Dean could... try to figure out his life from there. Moving on from Cas would be hard, but Dean couldn’t keep going if there was no future in it; not knowing what he knew.

Of course, if Cas loved him, or could, that wouldn’t get rid of the things that made their relationship harder already. If anything, it would make them even less bearable. But not unbearable, if that was what was on the line. Forever with Cas, the kind of forever that his parents had, what his uncles and aunt had, like even Sam had found a decade before him. That was sure as hell worth it.

All that introspection only took a few seconds, so his laughter was just winding down when Sam said, “He was right, you are terrible. You assholes deserve each other.” But he was fighting laughter to say it, shaking his head the same way he did for Dean’s antics, and Dean loved Cas a little more in that moment for connecting with Sam so quickly. For liking Sam, because he was pretty sure Cas wouldn’t fake that even for him.

He was gonna tell Cas, but not then, with Sam involved. It would wait. So he nudged Sam’s shoulder with his. “That’s nothing. His publicist told me about this time a couple years back that this kid, like, maybe twelve, came to a signing and started quoting scripture at him—”

“You are not allowed to talk to Hannah anymore.” Cas’s brow furrowed. “Why were you talking to Hannah?”

Dean rolled his eyes at the wariness in Cas’s tone. “Just that magazine I told you about. She got them to fuck off once and for all. And she told me,” he continued, not to be deterred, “that you made the poor kid cry because if heaven isn’t real, he was never going to see his hamster again.”

“That’s—” Sam looked horrified at his own laughter, but it didn’t stop him from snickering. “That’s awful, Cas. That’s an awful thing to do to a child.”

“It’s not as though I knew he was—mourning his favorite rodent. Despite what Hannah thinks, I wasn’t trying to traumatize him. Children can be difficult to speak to, you never know when one of them is going to get irrationally upset at something.”

“Yeah, I think you can consider _hamster hell_ universally upsetting. And wasn’t Claire around the same age?”

“Claire’s parents didn’t send her after me with bible verses she didn’t even understand, to try and rehash a debate I’ve had countless times with actual theologists.”

The fact that Sam hadn’t stopped laughing just made Cas’s grumpiness more fun for Dean. He managed to find the breath to say, “I can’t believe we never heard about this before. How did it not become a thing?”

Cas shrugged. “Someone was considerate enough to have a more interesting scandal that day, I don’t remember who or what. And Hannah talked the parents out of trying to sue for emotional damages, or whatever it was they thought they could get money for. I told Hannah we should bill them for my lecture rate, instead.”

“You’re a monster,” Dean told him fondly. “You don’t feel even a little bad, do you?”

Barely grudgingly at all, Cas said, “I’m sorry the child lost his pet. I’m also sorry that he has to spend the rest of his life with a family who believes it’s better to lie to that child than help him learn to cope with one of the most fundamental human experiences. Everything dies and grief is inevitable; stigmatizing it and shielding children from it does more harm than good.”

Dean just kind of stared at him for a while after that. In the little box at the corner of the screen, so did Sam. Cas’s mouth scrunched in confusion before he finally asked, “What?”

“You are,” Dean said, then failed spectacularly to follow those words up with what Cas actually was. In his defense, it was a hard thing to narrow down. _Ridiculous_ only covered some of it, and _terrible_ had already been used. _Obnoxiously practical_ was kind of true, but mostly not, because Dean found it more charming than obnoxious even on the worst days—and that said more about his personality flaws than Cas’s.

 _Perfect_ might do, especially going by Cas’s definition of it. The one he’d all but forced through Dean’s defenses, when he was already unfairly weakened by Cas turning his brain to mush via dick-sucking. Who he was as a person, the things he did, the unbelievably surly things he said; he was perfect for Dean.

Dean would enjoy turning that against him at a later date.

“You’re a weirdo,” he said; it was basically the same sentiment. “Total freaking lunatic.”

“That shouldn’t be new information to you,” Cas said flatly. Then he smiled, a small and slow smile that Dean didn’t trust at all, despite the way it softened his eyes and flashed just the slightest sliver of his teeth. Without context, it probably looked like a very sweet smile—but Dean had context. That’s why he wasn’t surprised at all when Cas turned to Sam and asked, “So, what terrible stories do you have to tell me about teenage Dean?”

Groaning, Dean heaved himself off the couch. “I’m getting a beer.”

Even though Sam was the absolute worst brother, and before reaching the kitchen Dean could already hear him guffawing as he launched into the story of Rhonda Hurley and the Great Locker Room Incident of Senior Year, Dean grabbed him one, too.

* * *

Two hours and three beers later, Dean reluctantly called it a night. As much fun as they were having—and the only thing that could’ve improved that was having Cas physically present and touching him just a little bit more than Sam was comfortable with—it had to end sometime. He and Cas had work in the morning and Sam was wiped from his flight; he’d been ready to turn in when Dean called him down. But even as Cas got increasingly curt with tiredness, he came up with new questions or anecdotes to draw out the conversation a bit longer.

Dean couldn’t blame him, but they’d wear themselves down in no time if they spent as much time video chatting as they both wanted to. Plus, he didn’t want to bb wld responsible for Cas being a cranky dick to all his coworkers again, from sleep deprivation this time.

“All right, Sam, head on back to bed.” Dean grabbed the laptop off the coffee table and settled in on his lap instead, tilting the screen so he could see and be seen.

The questioning look Cas gave him had nothing on the incredulity from Sam, who demanded, “Did you really just try to send me to bed? I’m not a kid, Dean.”

“Please.” Turning to the side, Dean grinned at him. “You’ll always be my kid brother, even if you have babies and grandbabies and a hip replacement. But Cas and I are definitely adults in an adult relationship, and we need some adult alone time now.”

Though he wasn’t actually planning to do anything family unfriendly, just wanted a private moment or two with Cas, Dean enjoyed how quickly Sam grimaced and scrambled off the couch. Cas’s chuckle delighted him even more, and he looked back down to the screen to wink. Then, entirely truthfully, he added, “Oh, you know, I just remembered that I haven’t changed the sheets in the guest room since Cas was here.”

“Whatever,” Sam scoffed. “Like I’m supposed to believe that, presented with one of the greatest scientific minds of our age, you would choose to defile him anywhere other than your own bed.”

There had been a lot of defilement in a lot of places nowhere near his bed, but he could let Sam have that one. He did in fact have limits to how much of his kinky sex life he was willing to admit to just to gross out his brother. He wasn’t ashamed of what he liked, but it got weird and creepy to share after a certain point. Sam knowing about the panty thing was far enough for him.

And of course, Cas had latched onto that. “Dean,” he said once Sam was gone, voice low and promising. “Am I going to regret not snooping through your underwear drawer when I had the chance?”

“There’s, uh. There’s nothing very interesting in there right now.”

“Of course. Sam’s the one who mentioned it, not you. Was it just a one-time thing, not something you enjoyed?”

“No,” Dean said, maybe a little too quickly. I definitely enjoyed it. It’s just, it’s one of those things that’s more fun when there’s someone to appreciate them, you know? And there hasn’t been anyone interested in a while.”

“Well,” said Cas, “I’m interested.”

Of course he was. Perfect fucking man.

“I miss you.”

Cas’s bedroom eyes melted away to solemnity. “I know, and I miss you. I wish I could have been there tonight, really spent the evening with you and Sam. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to make it worse for a few days.”

The heaviness that settled in Dean’s heart wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it wasn’t fun, either. “Yeah?”

“I just got a series of interviews set up today for a new project, and I’ll be travelling for up to a week starting the day after tomorrow. I’ll still be able to talk in the evenings,” he assured Dean, who probably looked like someone had kicked his puppy. He felt like it. “But I likely won’t be available for texting during the day.”

That sucked, but again, could have been worse. He liked being able to check in with Cas throughout the day, share little thoughts and jokes that came to mind, but he could cope without for a week. He could’ve coped with no contact at all for a week, if there were a reason for it, but he was just as glad not to have to.

“Anything fun? Should I be keeping an eye out for an appearance of my favorite argumentative jackass somewhere?”

“No, nothing like that. It’s not definite yet, and won’t be public for a while even if it does work out.”

“Okay, but what _is_ it?”

Cas put on a worried, thoughtful look—that was very clearly fake. “I wouldn’t want to jinx it, Dean.”

“Right,” Dean snorted, “I forgot how superstitious you are. You don’t wanna tell me?”

“Not until I know more. I don’t want to create any false hope if it turns out to be unfeasible.”

“False hope? Sounds big.”

“It could be.” Cas’s smile was contagious, even if Dean didn’t know the real cause behind it. “It’s an opportunity I’m very excited about, if it goes according to plan.”

“Well, here’s hoping it does. And you’ll tell me when you can? I want to be excited for you.”

“I think you will be,” Cas said, then paused and modified it to, “I hope you will be.”

A glance at the clock told Dean it was way past time to go to bed, and he’d probably be hurting in the morning. Nothing some coffee—the non-euphemistic sort—couldn’t fix, but he really did need to get some sleep before it got worse. His declaration should wait until they weren’t both half asleep, and when Cas wasn’t about to run around on some secret exciting mission.

“Okay,” he declared, “I’m gonna get my ass in bed before I pass out on the couch. You should, too, or you’ll be even more of a grouch than usual in the morning.”

Though Cas protested vehemently the characterization of his grouchiness as grouchiness, he agreed and they finally ended the call. On his way to his bedroom, laptop tucked under one arm, Dean was startled to see Sam waiting for him in the hallway. He couldn’t read the look on Sam’s face, other than thoughtful in a way that had the potential to be concerning. It would’ve been out of character for Sam to listen in, but even if he had, Dean couldn’t imagine what might have put that wrinkle in his brow.

But all Sam said was, “You’re happy. I mean,” he added before Dean could do more than roll his eyes, “I knew that just from talking to you. But, you know, getting to fulfill your celebrity crush fantasies would give anyone a lasting euphoria. But this is—it’s not that. I think this is the happiest I’ve ever seen you.”

Dean’s smile felt dopey and he didn’t give a damn. “I’ve been trying to tell you, Sammy. It stopped being about Cas being Castiel Novak, I don’t know, probably when we had dinner with everyone at the yard.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry I doubted it. Thanks for letting me third wheel on you guys for so long, it was nice. I really like him, and I think he’s good for you.”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed. “We’re pretty fucking great together.”

And eventually—sooner rather than later, Dean hoped—he’d figure out how they could actually be _together._


	9. Meissa

The house was dark when Cas let himself in. It wasn’t unexpected, there was no one who should’ve been there, but it still nocked a pang of loneliness between his ribs. He’d spent most of his life content to live alone; still, after Dean’s company he found himself acutely aware of the emptiness.

Kicking off his shoes by the door, he set aside the gloom and carried his bags groceries through to the kitchen. He didn’t usually bother with cooking, much less planning multiple meals, but he was in the mood for it and had the afternoon free, so he’d made a trip to the store and bought more meat and produce than a single person could reasonably consume.

He ended up putting most of it away, wherever he could find room in the fridge and cabinets, and just left out what he needed for burgers. Ground beef, brioche buns, cheese; lettuce and tomato and onion. After a moment’s consideration, looking over his supplies, he returned to the fridge and took the bacon back out.

Cheeseburgers were better with bacon.

To fill the silence, he pulled up a podcast. Inane public radio trivia, but it was entertaining enough to get him through seasoning the meat and forming the patties, then slicing the various accompaniments. But by the time everything was prepared, he wasn’t ready to start cooking—it was too early for dinner—so he wrapped and refrigerated the perishables and turned off the quiz show in favor of reading.

Ephraim had sent him a new chapter for review. If he could get it marked before dinner, he wouldn’t have to worry about it over the weekend. Not that he usually minded working on his days off, but for once he had plans he was absolutely unwilling to compromise on. So when he hit 5:20 without making it to the end of the section, he sent his advisee a quick email, letting him know not to expect feedback until later in the week, and put it out of his mind.

He had the burger patties sizzling away on the stove, already flipped once, when the front door opened tentatively at the end of the hallway.

“Uh, hello? Who’s in my house and why does it smell amazing?”

Cas’s heart did not leap out of his chest. That was anatomically impossible, and not even a particularly appealing romantic hyperbole; even ignoring the gore inherent in the spontaneous separation of a heart from a ribcage, wasn’t it contrary to the intent of the expression for a person to lose the very organ whimsically credited for feelings of affection?

But absurd euphemism or not, his heart did feel bigger and also paradoxically lighter at hearing Dean’s voice in person for the first time in over a month.

Rather than respond, Cas slid the patties off onto two toasted buns he had waiting and carried both plates to the table. Dean came through the kitchen, predictably, so Cas had time to sit down and watch him round the corner then freeze. Cas had been smiling since the door opened, and the play of emotions across Dean’s face as he took in the scene removed any possibility of it not turning into a smug grin.

He hadn’t been sure until that moment that no one had given away his plans to Dean. After all, it had taken several people to organize the endeavor. But based on Dean’s reaction to finding Cas waiting in his house with a home-cooked meal ready for the two of them, his secret had been kept.

“Cas! What—how are you here?”

“There are these wonderful inventions called airplanes, they fly you right through the air to get from one place to another. I don’t know all the details on how they work, but I know this engineering nerd who could tell you—”

Dean interrupted him with a snort of laughter. “Asshole!” he accused. Delight plain in his features and tone, he circled around the table to Cas’s side, pushing at his shoulder so Cas’s chair turned toward him, and repeated, “You fucking asshole,” before leaning over him to claim a kiss. Dean’s lips were soft but his mouth was hot and demanding, forceful with a need that Cas could relate to.

Talking to Dean on the phone and online was good, more enjoyable than talking to anyone else in person; watching Dean touch himself, particularly at Cas’s command, was infinitely more satisfying than any pornography. But it didn’t compare to a real connection. The physicality of Dean’s hand slowly clenching tighter around a handful of shirt on his shoulder, of Dean’s throat vibrating under his touch with a moan when Cas cradled the side of it in his palm, of Dean’s breath all but stopping as he drank in Cas instead of air—those moments couldn’t be replicated at a distance.

Eventually they broke apart, though Dean didn’t go far away. Leaning his forehead against Cas’s, he laughed, shallow and wondrous. “You’re here.”

“Obviously.”

“Fuck you, you jackass.”

“Mm, maybe later. Not much later. But I made you dinner, we should eat before it gets cold.”

“Okay, so let’s eat.” Dean flashed him a dazzling smile and dropped down, nudging his way between Cas’s unresisting legs. He was perfectly ready to forget about dinner as Dean opened his pants and pulled him out, warm from making out like a teenager but not hard yet. But then Dean looked up at him from beneath coy lashes and said, “The burgers smell great, but I’m more interested in the other meat you brought for me.”

It was such a terrible line that Cas almost refused to reward it with his cock. Almost. Luckily for Dean, Cas had missed him enough that he was willing to overlook that lapse in good taste. Also working in Dean’s favor was how he chose that moment to wet the tip of Cas’s cock with a quick swipe of his tongue, gentle but enough to drag a groan out of him that was the very opposite of disapproving.

“Dean, fuck.”

He did it again, then licked a stripe down to the base as Cas swelled into the stimulation. Dropping one hand to Dean’s hair, Cas tugged sharply to make Dean look up at him again.

“I was trying to do something nice for you.” He made it chiding, just a bit, but it wasn’t really a complaint.

“You did.” Dean nuzzled the tip of his cock without trying to return to what he’d been doing. “You’re here. You—Cas, you’re _here_. That’s the nicest thing you could ever do for me. But you also made me a gorgeous burger, and I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful, I just have higher priorities. So yeah. I’m gonna give you a blowjob now, unless you object.”

Loosening his grip to pet through Dean’s hair, Cas said, “No, no objections here. I’m nowhere near a selfless enough man to stop you if that’s your plan.”

If it were up to him, he’d never stop watching Dean swallowing his cock like a man starved. Focusing his attentions on the head, just the way Cas liked, Dean sank the heat of his mouth around Cas’s cock over and over, tongue sliding and lips dragging on sensitive flesh until Cas had a full mouthful for him to work with. He cupped Cas’s balls in his hand, warming more than fondling.

“Fuck, Dean. You’re so good at that.” Cas couldn’t have stopped stroking Dean’s hair if he wanted to, which he unequivocally did not; touching Dean was a need on par with breathing. It was the only thing he could do to reciprocate how amazing Dean made him feel.

Well, not quite the only thing.

“Look at you,” he praised, and was rewarded by a pleased pink spreading across Dean’s freckles. “Look how good you are for me. Do you have any idea how beautiful you are like this? On your knees, sucking me so sweetly, like it’s the only thing you want for the rest of your life.”

Dean moaned around him, a low, needy sound that reverberated all the way through Cas.

“Yeah? Would you like that, Dean? Want to live on my cock? Because fuck, I could almost live in your mouth.”

Without pausing the rhythm of his movements, Dean shot him a look so clear in its intent that Cas could very nearly hear Dean’s voice asking, _Almost?_

“I’m greedy,” Cas reminded him. “I want all of you. Your mouth is amazing, is perfect, but I’d never give up the rest of you. Think of all I’d be losing.

“I mean, your ass, obviously. I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly thus far, and I’m quite attached to the idea of enjoying it again. Losing myself inside you, do you have any idea? It was the most intimate experience I’ve ever shared. You were so good, Dean. You trusted me so much, just let me take care of you, take you apart so sweetly. It was amazing. _You’re_ amazing.”

Though Dean didn’t falter on Cas’s cock, his eyes closed and his shoulders hunched with discomfort that Cas knew wasn’t physical. He slipped his hand down to stroke Dean’s cheek, tapping near Dean’s eye to make it blink open at him again, and at that Dean did stop moving.

Lips stretched around him, eyes dark and uncertain, Dean was gorgeous and vulnerable. How a man as attractive, smart, and caring as Dean managed to doubt those qualities about himself remained a mystery.

“I’m going to keep telling you things that I like about you. You may as well get used to it, because I’m finding new additions to that list constantly.”

But perhaps it was unfair to push the issue with Dean’s mouth too occupied to respond. He didn’t want to overwhelm him—at least, not like that. If things went the way Cas hoped they would, he’d have time to wear down Dean’s defensiveness. Maybe even the rest of their lives.

“But never mind that now. We were in the middle of something very important, weren’t we? I was telling you how wonderful your mouth is.”

When he traced the curve of Dean’s mouth where it wrapped around him, Dean shivered into the touch and threw himself back into lavishing attention on Cas’s cock with a dedication that felt a lot like gratitude. The dizzying swirl of sensation wasn’t quite enough to drown the twinge of guilt he felt at having distressed Dean to that extent, but that too was set aside for a later time.

“But also how there’s no part of you I’d be willing to trade it for. That’s the important thing. Every part of you, everything you do. Just living without when I was gone was nearly unbearable. How could I do it indefinitely?

“Can you imagine,” he asked, dragging his blunt nails over Dean’s scalp, “never having your hands on me again? To never have your fingers wrapped around my cock, stroking me off just as fast or slow as I tell you to. Never have your fingers _inside me_ , pushing in, spreading me open for your cock—and your cock, Dean.”

Groaning again, Dean pressed his free hand to the front of his pants—to the cock in question, making its presence visible against the crotch of his dark slacks—and rocked his hips into the contact. He was gorgeous, flushed and losing himself so quickly to the intensity of it.

“How am I supposed to tolerate never having you fill me up? I don’t think you’d like that, either. Don’t you want to fuck me, Dean?”

Dean didn’t just moan in agreement; he seemed to be trying to form words, lips moving, throat humming, head nodding enthusiastically—all of which had a delightful effect given that he was in the middle of blowing Cas. It rolled through Cas, shivered across his skin as though Dean were licking and sucking him all over with the same enthusiasm being shown to his cock.

“Oh, fuck. That’s it, that’s so good. And I know you’ll make it good like this when you’re fucking me, too. If I want it hard, you’ll go hard, hm? Really put your back into it, drive into me so hard I’ll be sore for days. _You’ll_ be sore for days. But you’ll keep going, even when it hurts, even when you’re exhausted, because we feel so great together.”

As Cas spoke, Dean’s mouth got more frantic around him with each word. He grew sloppy with need; not neglecting Cas, never that, but losing the finer details of his coordination. The suction of his lips and shallow bobbing of his head loosened, broke down until he was throwing himself headlong onto Cas’s cock, all but choking himself every time he sunk down.

The second time Dean’s throat spasmed around him, Cas waited for him to pull back then stopped him from moving further with a hand on each side of Dean’s head. Dean looked up at him, eyes dark beneath his lashes and mouth parted just around the crown of Cas’s cock, and waited. His hand twitched on his crotch.

“Are you ready to come, Dean?” He didn’t wait for an answer; he really didn’t need to, anyway. “I know, me too. You’ve done so well, you’ve been so good to me. Will you let me do the hard work now? Let me take care of you like you’ve been taking care of me.”

He found the way Dean had to work to reclaim his mouth—struggling to take his lips off Cas, wetting them several times before he could speak—extremely gratifying. Equally satisfactory: the way his voice shook when he finally managed, “Yeah. Please.”

Since he couldn’t kiss Dean at that angle, Cas showed his approval with a sweep of his thumb over Dean’s eyebrow. “Thank you. I cherish the trust you have for me more than I can adequately describe.”

Dean blinked, licked his lips again, then grinned. “Let’s hear it, you kinky bastard.”

Tilting his head and raising his eyebrows, Cas waited for an explanation of that. For Dean to be coming back to full coherence so quickly, it had to be something he figured he could mock Cas about; banter was the only thing that could pull him out of a sex stupor like that.

Yet again, Cas marvelled at the statistical improbability of having found a partner who suited him so well.

“You only get that kinda sappy when you want to try something new and you’re not sure I’ll like it. I’m pretty damn sure I will, but you’ve got my attention, so go on. What do you want to do to me?”

Was he really so predictable? He’d have to work on that, though Dean didn’t seem to be complaining. He certainly wasn’t wrong.

“I want you to keep jacking off, just like that.” Nudging inward with one foot, he indicated Dean’s hand still closed around the outside of his pants. “Come in your slacks while I come on your face. Sound good?”

“Fuck. Yeah.”

Dean didn’t wait another second to start moving against his palm again. His eyes slipped closed and his mouth slipped open, the ultimate picture of debauched desire and a perfect target for Cas. Just the thought of decorating Dean, spreading milky splashes over his upturned face, was almost enough to set him off. But timing it right would enhance the experience, connect them in the moment, so he waited.

He waited for Dean’s fingers to start moving: twitching, rubbing helplessly were they rested near his balls. He could’ve used them to stroke himself through the fabric, but either he thought that would violate Cas’s request or he was too far gone to take his hand away even for that adjustment. Whichever it was, Cas didn’t feel the need to intervene. Not by stopping Dean, anyway.

Instead, he allowed it to serve as his cue to lift his right hand from Dean’s hair and wrap it around himself. His cock was still damp from Dean’s mouth and jumped into his touch, eager after being ignored for the length of that conversation. He was as desperate for it as Dean, which was why he’d had to hold himself back until that moment, when Dean was also right on the edge.

It took only two full strokes and a few seconds of focused attention on the head, then it was time to hold steady and aim as he jerked out his orgasm. Cas’s eyes wanted so badly to close so he could bask in the mind-clearing bliss, but w didn’t want his mind cleared or his eyes closed. He needed both of those to appreciate his come spreading across Dean’s face and Dean twitching as it caught him by surprise.

Just as Cas had hoped, that was the thing to set Dean off. Dean’s climax tore out of him with a gutteral noise, pushing his mouth obscenely wider. A line of white landed across it, striping Dean’s lips top and bottom; some disappeared inside. His hips ground into his palm, slower with each shuddering breath, until they staggered to a halt and his hand fell away.

Eyes still closed—he had to be able to feel the droplets curling over his left eyelid—Dean darted his tongue out to swipe the come from his lips. Maybe he wanted to chase the taste that had made it inside his mouth, maybe he wanted to clean himself up a bit, maybe it was an expression of the same unconscious nervous habit that had him frequently biting his lip. Whatever the cause, the sight shot hot desire through Cas’s veins. It was nothing he could act on immediately, given his own very recent ejaculation marking up Dean’s face, but it gave him ideas for the future.

For the time being, he used a thumb to rub the come out of Dean’s eye and told him, “You’re fucking amazing, Dean. Come here.” He surprised himself with the revealing hoarseness of his own voice. His mouth had been open the entire time he’d been staring at Dean’s, not swallowing until Dean swallowed some of _him_ , and he was thirsty from it.

Both literally and in the popular culture sense of the word.

The former could wait; he slaked the latter as soon as Dean pushed off his knees and straddled Cas’s lap. Cas tasted himself on Dean’s tongue, felt his own come smearing across his cheeks because Dean’s face was still covered in it. It was messy and organic, desperate and longing, bordering on painful when Dean’s teeth caught on his lips and Dean’s fingers dug into the back of his head. Nearly everything Cas had been missing during his time in Illinois.

He was reasonably certain he’d get the rest of it later in the evening and all the way through to morning; he could find alternative sleeping arrangements and spend yet another night in a cold and lifeless bed, but he hoped not to have to.

Finally sated on kissing, or at least sated enough for the moment, Dean pulled back just enough to meet Cas’s eyes.

“Hey,” he whispered into the intimate space between them.

“Hello, Dean,” Cas answered with the same hushed secrecy.

“I’m so glad you’re here.”

“So am I.”

Dean leaned in again, and Cas moved in to meet him—and got more drying come dragged across his face from Dean’s, very deliberately. Laughing at his indignant protest—and there was another thing he’d missed, having Dean’s laughter shake him when their bodies were pressed together—Dean stood and winced at the state of his pants.

“Shower?” Cas offered, but Dean shook his head and turned to grab a burger. Cas’s burger, sitting on the plate right in front of his chair. But Cas couldn’t begrudge Dean the bite he took, not when it resulted in a moan remarkably similar to the ones Dean had made earlier.

“Forget about keeping me chained up for blowjobs,” Dean said between swallowing and eating more of Cas’s burger. “I’m keeping you chained up for cheeseburgers.”

Considering he hadn’t mentioned chains at all, Cas found it very interesting that Dean had. He filed it away for future reference, plans to be made and offered to Dean for their mutual enjoyment. But he’d let sex distract them from the conversation they needed to have once already, and while he didn’t regret it, it would have been irresponsible to let it go further.

“I’ll only make you more cheeseburgers if I’m allowed to eat some of them.” Reclaiming his half-eaten dinner, Cas nudged Dean around to his own seat.

“Okay,” allowed Dean, “you can have some. But you’re lucky I like you so much, because these are damn good and I wouldn’t share with just anyone.”

“I am lucky,” Cas agreed. Partly because it was true, but mostly for Dean’s half-hearted grimace at his earnestness. “I also want to keep making you burgers.”

“I’m in. How long are you in Lawrence this time? _Why_ are you in Lawrence this time?”

Setting aside his meal, Cas cut right to it. “I’m here because I missed you. And I’d like to stay permanently, if that’s on the table.”

* * *

Though he’d appreciated Dean’s shower on his first and last visit, Cas hadn’t had a chance to test his hypothesis that both of them could fit comfortably inside. They could, as he learned when Dean answered his statement with the declaration, “This is too big, I’m not having this conversation with come in my pants,” and further ordered that Cas would be joining him to “clean up your mess.”

Cas took issue with precisely none of that, and so found himself at the outer edge of the stream of water, washcloth in hand, massaging suds over Dean’s back. There had been some tension in Dean’s shoulders when he started—not a worrying amount, not closing himself off from Cas, but noticeable.

It eased some when Cas said, “Whenever you’re ready, it’s fine, I’m not going anywhere,” and more when Cas took him up on his offer and, slowly, leaving time for Dean to stop him, molded himself to Dean’s back and reached around to gently wipe around his groin. The drying come had mostly come off with his boxer briefs, but Cas still washed him carefully, gentle as he lathered the curls of Dean’s pubic hair.

He kept his touch soft when he washed Dean’s cock; he wasn’t trying to stimulate him, just take care of him, help him relax.

It worked, by the way Dean slumped back into him, trusting Cas to take some of his weight.

“I’m not upset,” Dean said first.

His head was down and his eyes were closed, but Cas accepted that as the truth and waited for Dean to get to what it was that had caused him to retreat, in his own time.

“I’m—you have to know I missed you, too. I’ve been fucking _dreaming_ about what it would be like to have you here all the time. But I keep having to tell myself it’s just that, just a daydream. It’s crazy.”

“Dean—”

Dean straightened and turned, keeping himself in Cas’s arms and making what was clearly an effort to look at him. “No, listen, it is. You have a life in Chicago, your family, your career, everything. You’re established there, you—you’re a fucking celebrity, Cas. You have so much going on, so much going for you. I’m not—I can’t ask you to give that up for me.”

 _For me_ , Dean said. Not _for us_ , not qualified with _right now_ or _this early in the relationship_. Maybe Cas was reading meaning into that word choice that wasn’t really there, but he didn’t think so. He thought it probably came from the same place as Dean’s reticence to accept compliments and his strong reaction to praise.

Since that was likely a fraught topic and he didn’t want to see Dean’s spine stiffen again, Cas tempered his response—he was able to, thank you Jimmy, he just usually chose not to—and only said, “You haven’t asked me to give up anything.”

Snorting out a disbelieving laugh through his nose, Dean shook his head. His eyes broke away from Cas’s gaze, dropping down to his shoulder or chest, it was hard to tell. “Maybe not explicitly, but would you ever even have considered leaving if not for me? You’ve lived there your entire life.”

“Right now? No. Eventually I might have, though it would take a compelling reason. So yes, I want to move to Kansas _because_ of you, but you’re not forcing me into it. If anything, I’m the one exerting undue pressure by making the arrangements I have without consulting you.”

“Arrangements,” Dean repeated. He looked at Cas again, confused into losing some of the unusual smallness that had overtaken his frame; the raised eyebrows suited him much better. “What arrangements?’

They’d stopped even the pretense of using the shower, so Cas wrung out the cloth one-handed and said, “I have a lot of news to share, and I hope you’ll think it’s all as good as I do. But I’m not sure it’s a shower conversation any more than it’s a covered-in-come conversation.”

Dean considered that, then nodded. “Fair enough. It was supposed to be a dinner conversation, right? Might be a little cold now, but I don’t mind if you don’t.”

Before turning off the water, Cas couldn’t resist the urge to pull Dean closer for a wet kiss. “Thank you for humoring me.”

“It’s a real chore,” Dean agreed with a more genuine, easy laugh, “letting you feed me.”

* * *

Back at the table, Dean in fresh jeans and a t-shirt, things felt better. The shower hadn’t been bad, by any stretch, but if their talk didn’t go the way Cas hoped, he knew they’d both need more space than that. Maybe even if it did.

Despite the discussed plan to finish dinner, Cas ignored his burger in favor of taking a sip of the beer Dean had provided. “As I said, I want to stay. I want to be here, and I’ve been working to make that happen. This past week, the project I’ve been working on—I’ve moved to Lawrence.”

Dean blinked. He opened his mouth, closed it, bit his lip. Then he took a drink of beer and another bite of his burger before he finally spoke, expression thoughtful the whole time. All he asked was, “In a week?”

“I was motivated.”

“Right. I just—I don’t see how that makes sense.”

Cas’s heart once again acted like it had more power over him than simple circulation; it plummeted out of his chest, falling away to an unknown place and leaving a vacuum in its wake that felt as cold as the cosmic void. None of that was possible, of course, but emotions were physiologically complex.

Jimmy had been right, which Cas always hated to admit. He’d been so sure he was acting rationally despite his twin’s objections, that he had a logical basis for everything he decided to do, but he wasn’t as an objective judge as he wanted to be.

“I know it’s still early in the relationship, but this isn’t an attempt to force a commitment from you. I’ve bought a condo, I have work—we don’t need to rush into anything more. I’m not asking you to let me move in with you.” Though if Dean offered, he wasn’t enough of a fool to say no. Or did that make him more of one? “Just let us see what we can be together when we actually have the chance to be together.”

“God, Cas. It’s not commitment I’m worried about, at least not like that.”

Dean reached across the table to take Cas’s hands in his, and the solid, warm touch offered enough reassurance to settle Cas back into his course.

“I don’t care how early or quick or whatever people think it is. I’m in. I’m so fucking in, Cas, but if I weren’t, or if you find out there’s a limit to how much of me you can stand? You’ve given up everything for a chance at something here. And I’m not saying I wouldn’t do the same, but—your everything is a hell of a lot more than mine.”

“First of all, I didn’t give up anything I wasn’t willing to. But second, what I did ‘give up’ was much less than you probably think. It’s a perk of being unnecessarily rich and famous: I can do what I do pretty much anywhere I choose. My visibility makes it easier for me to relocate, not harder. Absolutely easier than it would be for you.

“For example, I made this decision a week ago and, as I said, I already have a place to live and a job, because I have the money and influence to accomplish that. More specifically, I have Hannah to accomplish that. You trying to do the same would be stressful for both of us, and I have no problem taking advantage of my privilege for this cause.

“I’ve shamelessly bought my way onto the KU faculty; my name and reputation, and a very small amount of my money, are building them a state-of-the-art observatory. I’ll teach a mid-level course starting next year, and combined those should bring some new interest to the physics and astronomy departments, and to the university as a whole.

“If things don’t work out between us, I will be...” He paused, collected his thoughts to be expressed with the candor and gravity that they deserved. “Personally, I will be devastated. But professionally, I’m risking very little. My current contract is as a guest lecturer for two years, during the construction, and after that I wouldn’t be obligated to stay. I’m still on the board at Adler, and they even want to keep me in an emeritus position so they can continue to claim me as faculty there. They’d take me back full time if I ever asked.

“I still have the house in La Grange. I’ve rented it out to my graduate student at a laughably under-market rate, but I’m keeping it for Claire even if I never move back.”

“And what about Claire?” Dean had been processing the onslaught of information quietly, only reacting with a wrinkle of his forehead or a squeeze of Cas’s fingers. But at that he leaned forward, open with his concern. “What about Jimmy and Amelia? You don’t think you’ll regret the distance?”

“It may be difficult,” Cas allowed. “I can’t say for sure how either of us will handle it, because we’re grown men in our forties who’ve managed to avoid being separated for more than a few weeks at a time. But there will be plenty of opportunity to visit, in both directions. And even if it’s hard, it’s worth it.

“You’re worth it.”

The meal was again forgotten as Dean stood, using their joined hands to pull Cas up with him, and they met around the end of the table. Cas expected to be dragged onto Dean’s lips. Instead, Dean’s hands on either side of his face just held him there for Dean to look at. Unsure what Dean was searching for, he just let it happen and waited for a sign.

“You fucking jackass.” He grinned as he said it; it was one of his most common endearments for Cas, and one of Cas’s favorites to hear for the fond way Dean called out a quality most other people resented. “I can’t believe you did all this shit without me finding out. Which of my treacherous, scheming relatives gave you a key?”

“Ellen.”

Dean snorted. “See if she gets it back, if she’s gonna go around handing it out to any bedraggled stranger who asks.”

“She still has hers, actually. She made a brand new copy of the key for this bedraggled stranger. But,” he added quickly, “I left it in the hall, and it can stay there if you’d like. I meant what I told you, I’m not trying to force myself into your life. The decisions I made were for myself, none of it obligates you to—”

“Shut up.” Dean finally claimed that kiss, fierce but short, then knocked their foreheads together and let the warm breath of his laughter stroke Cas’s lips in place of his tongue. “You sweet, considerate, absurd fucking dickhead. What part of ‘I’m in’ do you not get? Keep the key. Sell the condo.”

“Are you—”

“Sell the goddamn condo, Cas. Or rent it to a broke post-doc or turn it into a yoga studio or fill it with potted plants and foster kittens, I don’t care. But don’t live there. Be here, with me. Please.”

There was no other way to answer that, no answer Cas would ever want to give. He pressed himself closer still to Dean and wrote his agreement over Dean’s skin with his mouth and hands.


	10. Polaris

Since Dean’s schedule only had him teaching three days a week in the current semester, he was home the first day of classes. Cas wasn’t; he’d taken to teaching courses with enthusiasm, especially for a guy who’d managed to avoid it for most of his impressive academic career. When Cas had announced before his first semester was even half over that he was taking on two more classes, one of which was a grad seminar that met for a three-hour block once a week, Dean had briefly wondered who or what had taken over his famously misanthropic partner.

Reassuringly, not a day later, the internet lost its shit over a video of Cas being his usual jackass self. It started just after the action began, as was usually the way of live bystander video, but caught the important parts anyway. Cas had been captured chewing out an assistant football coach for interrupting his lecture over something that even the beleaguered coach, after a good ten minutes of browbeating, admitted wasn’t actually urgent enough to justify the intrusion.

Dean had spent a week laughing about that and replaying the video every chance he got. He even had his favorite audio clip from it saved on his phone, Cas’s most scathing voice suggesting that if the coach actually cared about his player’s future, he’d send him to more classes instead of removing him from them, since it was irresponsible to suggest that any college football player could earn a living in the sport given the astronomically low chances _—and yes, I’m qualified to mean that literally—_ of making it to a successful professional team.

“And that’s not even getting started,” Cas had growled, “On your personal responsibility for what effect the inevitable brain trauma will have on the rest of this young man’s life. But no, I’m sure you’re right, and his ability to run and ram himself at other young men is far more important than any contributions that a bright mind full of potential might make to science or art or being a father to his six-month-old son.”

It hadn’t made him particularly popular with a certain subset of the public, but they weren’t necessarily fans of his to begin with. Sports networks were still talking about it, and Dean told Cas more than once that Hannah wasn’t being paid nearly enough for how much trouble he was. Cas didn’t disagree.

Cas had managed to make it through the rest of the semester without too much more in the way of media attention, so hopefully he didn’t have non-students trying to sneak a seat in his class just to get a look at him the way they had for the intro course. Still, Dean was prepared for whatever sort of of mood the day left him in. Even as a slightly seasoned professor, Cas didn’t have a whole lot of tolerance for willful ignorance, and college students could be obnoxious little shits when they tried.

He didn’t get much warning before Cas walked through the door, because the Tesla didn’t make any kind of appropriate car noises (and also maybe because he was singing along to _Immigrant Song_ at a volume that would’ve been a problem if they had close neighbors). So he still had his _Fuck the Cook_ apron on, which—it wasn’t like Cas hadn’t seen it and taken its advice to heart before, but Dean wasn’t actually cooking this time. And he didn’t usually wear it with nothing but a pair of lacy red panties underneath.

That was the aesthetic he’d been hoping to surprise Cas with, not his novelty apron, a pair of elbow-length rubber gloves, and a sponge fresh from the toilet in his hand.

Cas seemed to appreciate the view all the same, going by the deliberate drag of his gaze from Dean’s bare shoulder down his arm, then up from his feet to where the apron ended mid-thigh. By the time his eyes got back to Dean’s face, they were flatteringly hungry.

He could work with that. “Welcome home, Professor Novak.” Dean tossed the sponge back in the bathroom, not giving a single shit where it landed, then took a little more care and time stripping off the gloves; Cas watched with rapt interest. “Did you have a good day?”

“I did,” Cas answered in the low, richly textured voice he used when trying to melt Dean’s brain out his ears with kinky promises. It remained effective. “I’m hoping I’ll have an even better evening, though.”

Raising his eyebrows in mock reproval, Dean chided, “Presumptuous.”

Cas smirked and very deliberately looked him over again. “Granted,” he said, “I’m not suggesting that you’re obligated to do anything sexual just because you greeted me at the door naked save for that provocative apron. But I don’t think you can do that and call me _presumptuous_ for thinking it might lead somewhere.”

“Shows what you know,” Dean scoffed. He discarded his gloves and sauntered up to Cas, draping his arms over Cas’s shoulders and leaning in close to whisper, “I’m not naked under here.”

He felt Cas’s head move, his neck craning to get a better view down Dean’s back. Then his breath caught and his hands closed around Dean’s hips, half on the apron and half on bare skin. The tips of his pinky fingers just brushed the top edge of the lace.

“Dean.” It was half breath, half groan, and wholly desperate. “Please tell me I can take you to bed. Where did— _when_ did you even get those?”

Laughing, Dean eased Cas’s hands off his hips; Cas let him step back, but not without one last protesting clench of his fingers on Dean’s skin. Then he he was back to staring, his dark, greedy eyes a perfect complement to his unfairly attractive sex-mussed look: wild hair, late afternoon scruff, askew tie that he insisted on wearing but refused to do up properly. Honestly, he had no idea how Cas’s students learned anything when they were constantly faced with _that_.

Dean himself could rarely resist the ‘eccentric professor in a rumpled trench coat’ appearance for more than about ten minutes.

That day, already keyed up from an hour of shopping for the perfect pair of panties and imagining Cas’s reaction (so far just as gratifying as expected), he gave himself credit for making it two minutes before backing toward the stairs as he untied the apron from his waist. Then he reached up to untie the neck loop, too. It would be a small added annoyance to have to redo it next time instead of just slipping it over his head, but that was well worth the flair of letting it drop straight to the floor.

“Is this what you want?”

He really should’ve known better than to tease Cas. But at least when it backfired, it backfired spectacularly.

“What I want,” Cas said, voice low and dangerous, making Dean feel like he was being hunted down even though Cas hadn’t taken a single step toward him, “is to take you upstairs, tie you to our bed, and see how much I can make you mess up those pretty panties with just my mouth.” He licked his lips, leaving them slightly, obscenely parted, before he added, enunciating every word for emphasis, “All over you.”

Only sheer force of will kept Dean’s knees from buckling; he needed those to get up the stairs. He was too dizzy with desire to do anything but stand there, almost shaking with anticipation at that. At least until Cas tilted his head, raised his eyebrows, and asked, “Is that what _you_ want?”

The noise Dean made was definitely not a word, but it was an answer. He covered the distance between them, even though it was the opposite direction from where he needed to go, so that he could grab Cas by the crooked tie and haul him in for a long overdue kiss—their last one had been almost seven hours ago, when Cas left for the day. Not all his days were that long, he’d wanted extra time to prepare for the start of classes, but Dean still preferred the days when they were both on campus and could easily rendezvous in someone’s office for a few minutes between classes.

Never mind new relationships and honeymoon phases and all that crap; nothing about the way Cas moved his lips and tongue against Dean’s would ever get old. It felt like home when Cas’s hands settled on his skin again, one on the small of his back to pull him close and the other cupping his jaw and neck to tilt him into the claim Cas laid on his mouth. Cas’s kisses weren’t new or novel anymore, but that would never stop them from being special. From making him feel special.

“I’m absurdly fucking besotted with you,” he declared once he’d finished melting into Cas and recovered some breath. “Also, you’re the hottest fucking bastard who could possibly exist without spontaneously combusting.”

“I’d rather make you spontaneously combust,” Cas said with a leer that meant he knew exactly how bad a line that was and also he thought Dean deserved it for having the gall to respond to his overtures with spontaneous fucking human combustion. Which was fair enough.

Rubbing his lace-clad erection against Cas’s hip by way of apology, he said, “Well then, hot stuff, take me to bed and have your way with me.”

Cas’s answering grin should have been illegal. He indicated the stairs and said, “After you.”

“So you can stare at my ass the whole way?” Not that Dean minded in the least; he’d happily be objectified by Cas all day, every day, which was why he started up the stairs before Cas could answer and added an extra bounce in his step for good measure. He only felt a little ridiculous for putting on a show, and that only lasted until Cas’s _fuck_ of approval followed him up.

Cas had lost his bag and shoes by the time they reached the bedroom, but kept the coat. It brushed against Dean’s knees when Cas pushed him down on the edge of the bed and straddled him, and the lapels rubbed on his chest when Cas pressed in to chase Dean’s breath away with his mouth. Dean arched into the feeling, stretched himself against Cas so the slightly rough cloth would drag over his nipples. The mild burn of it shivered deliciously all the way down his spine to his dick.

Time frequently lost its importance when he was caught up in Cas, so Dean had no idea how long it was from when they first got to the bed to when Cas slowly laid him on his back on top of the blankets, kissing him the whole way down. It wasn’t like it mattered; they had all night, and Cas would use as exactly as much of that time driving Dean crazy as he wanted to.

Dean’s arms had found their way around Cas’s neck at some point and he tried to use that leverage to draw Cas back down when he pulled away. But Cas’s hands trailed along his forearms and closed around his wrists, so Dean let Cas guide them above his head and press them into the pillows. The tip of Cas’s tie dangled in front of Dean’s face as Cas bent over to position him and he snagged it with his teeth. Not much, not biting down, but he got enough of it in his mouth that he could let it slip through his lips as Cas sat up.

He hadn’t learned his lesson about teasing Cas. That was a lesson he never planned to learn, because the wide dark of Cas’s pupils and the twitch in his dick that Dean could feel where they were pressed together didn’t exactly inspire him to _stop._

“Stay there,” Cas directed. As though Dean would want to be anywhere else.

Straightening so his weight was mostly on the floor instead of Dean’s legs, Cas flicked the end of his tie up to inspect the damp patch, then sighed and ran his fingers up to the knot to start untying it. Dean watched, biting his lip in anticipation, as the fabric came undone and slid out from under Cas’s collar. Then Cas stood all the way and stepped around Dean’s knees to lean over the head of the bed.

He guessed what was coming, but that didn’t stop the shiver centered at the base of his spine when Cas slipped the tie under one of his hands and knotted it around his wrist. It was tight enough that he could feel it without moving, without testing the knot—which he wouldn’t do, anyway. Not yet. If Cas lived up to his promises (and Cas always lived up to his promises), it wouldn’t take long for Dean to get to the point where he couldn’t help writhing and trying to get his hands free to do something, _anything,_ just to get to touch Cas.

But until then, he could be good. Always wanted to be so good for Cas.

The tie wrapped around his other wrist, snaking across his skin as it tightened and pulled both his arms closer to the headboard, just far enough above his head for the stretch in his shoulders to be noticeable. He tugged it a bit tighter without meaning to, because he couldn’t help but shiver when Cas left off securing him and stroked his fingers over the sensitive skin on the underside of Dean’s wrists. _Stroke_ wasn’t really the right word; there were nails involved, hard enough that he could imagine the faint pink trails left in their wake.

Cas moved away, no part of him touching Dean any longer. Dean missed the contact immediately, but the heat of Cas’s gaze was an almost physical thing as he took his time looking Dean over. Equal parts needy and cheeky, Dean spread his legs wider and canted his hips up to entice Cas’s attention where it deserved to be; where Cas had said he planned to focus it. His dick strained against the panties, stained the front of it with dampness.

Though Cas’s eyes tracking the movement send another shiver down his spine, Dean was more interested in how Cas’s hands followed it, sliding up from Dean’s knees as he moved back between them. His skin warm against Dean’s, Cas drew his palms so, so close to where Dean wanted them before slipping around to the outside instead of in and up the last few inches.

Dean bit his lip but didn’t voice his complaint; didn’t want to, after half a second, because Cas used his grip on Dean’s thighs to haul them up at the same as he went to his knees next to the bed. It ended up with Dean’s legs over Cas’s shoulders and Cas’s face in his crotch without any preliminaries. Cas was just _there_ , nuzzling at the lace where it stretched to cover Dean’s achingly hard dick. And because he was a sadistic bastard sometimes—a lot of the time, and Dean fucking loved it—Cas _stayed_ there.

Rubbed his cheek against Dean’s hip where it was cut by the red fabric, tugging it ever so slightly and making Dean’s dick twitch with every brush. Mouthed at the panties right beside the bulge in them, wetting around the patch that was already soaked with Dean’s precome. Didn’t give his dick more than the slightest unintentional graze in passing.

Dean was losing his mind and they’d barely even started.

Tempting as it was to try shoving himself at Cas’s face to get something done there, he knew it would only backfire. Cas would move away, smirk at him, and be an even more unbearable tease on the second round. No, when Cas had a plan, he couldn’t be swayed so easily; he took a different kind of persuasion.

“Cas, can you—”

Dean startled into a groan as Cas’s teeth closed around his hip bone and sunk a bruise into the skin. That he pressed into, chasing the blunt pain that felt almost as good as anything else Cas could’ve done to him. And that Cas allowed, biting down harder until Dean was gasping with the intensity of it. Then he let go, which left its own new sting behind, and grinned up at Dean. It was a hell of a sight, Cas’s stretched lips and knowing eyes peering up Dean’s body from behind his lacy red dick.

“Were you saying something?”

Giving back a stubborn jackass smile of his own, Dean said sweetly, “You know, I lost my train of thought. You’ll have to remind me.”

“Really.”

Cas stood, pushing Dean’s legs off his shoulders and swinging them around so he was stretched out fully on the bed. Then he followed. Climbing onto his knees on the bed, still fully clothed but for his shoes and the tie holding Dean where Cas wanted him, Cas grabbed Dean by the ankles and dragged them apart to make room for himself.

Fuck, he was unbelievably hot. Almost unfairly hot, but since Dean was the one who got to reap the benefit of it, he really didn’t mind.

“Because I’m sure you were going to ask me for something. I’m very sure you remember what it is, because you still want me to do it. And I’m absolutely positive that if you want it to happen now, you’ll have to do more than ask.”

He could’ve held out. Not that he didn’t want Cas’s mouth on him, but he wasn’t desperate yet. He had enough willpower to wait for Cas’s next move, make him work a little harder, but why? They both wanted to get to the next part, and if Cas wanted Dean to beg for it—well, they were both into that, too.

“Your mouth,” he said, eyes on Cas’s lips. “I was gonna ask you to put it to good use somewhere else. Because you’re driving me crazy, baby. And if it feels that good everywhere else, fuck.” He rolled his hips up into nothing—not nothing. The air, yes, but also into Cas’s devouring stare.

“Fuck,” he repeated, because the clench of his muscles made the panties shift over his dick and because the intensity of Cas’s focus always managed to be half the thrill of sex with him. All that intelligence and wit centered on him—enthralled by him, to a degree Dean could recognize but never would have predicted before the first time he sucked Cas off on the floor of his entryway—was a hell of a rush.

“Didn’t you want to make a mess of me? Let me have your mouth on me, let me really feel it, fuck I’ll be a disaster for you.”

“You’re already a disaster for me.” As obnoxiously smug as Cas was, the answer didn’t sting. Partly because there was no mistaking how fond he sounded in saying it and partly because it was just the truth. It also didn’t hurt that Cas followed up by dropping down to take the tip of Dean’s dick into his mouth, panties and all.

Cas’s tongue rubbed at him through the lace, dragged the pattern of loops and holes deliberately over the extra sensitivity of his frenulum before licking a filthy wet stripe all the way down the underside. When Cas slid his lips around one of Dean’s balls and sucked hard, they both groaned. Back up, then down, then open-mouthed along the side; Cas kept it up for as long as Dean could stand it. His attentions wandered over every inch of Dean’s dick, but never left unless it was to detour to his balls, just as full and eager for touch.

Then Cas scraped his teeth over the fabric just over the head. It was light, so light, but his teeth caught at the lace which caught at at the sticky mess of precome and clung to the skin so that he could feel the slide of pointed pressure without any of the sharpness. Dean’s whole body thrust up into it without conscious thought, zanking the tie deliciously tighter around his wrists, but Cas was already moving back and out of reach.

Sitting on his heels, his chin and cheeks obscenely shiny, Cas gave Dean about three seconds to recover before asking, “If I suck you off just like this and let you come in your panties, will you be able to fuck me after?”

Just the thought was enough to send a dangerous, throbbing spasm through Dean’s groin, but: “Not unless you’ve got a prescription for little blue pills I don’t know about,” he said, going for wry but ending up more breathless than anything. At least Cas hadn’t asked which Dean would rather do; he wasn’t in any kind of shape to be making a decision like that.

And it meant he knew what was coming (not him) when Cas got off the bed entirely.

Tied down and slowly easing away from the edge, he could only turn his head to watch Cas undress. It wasn’t a controlled, deliberate striptease like Cas often subjected him to; the hurried removal of clothes was as much a giveaway of Cas’s urgency as the state of his dick when everything was off and on the floor. His erection was a pretty clear sign too, of course, prominent and even a little wet at the tip already—though nothing compared to the flood Dean had made. It wiggled as he crossed to the nightstand to retrieve the lube and Dean watched shamelessly.

The bottle landed on the bed next to Dean after Cas slicked up his fingers, then Cas followed.Swinging a leg over to give Dean an even better view of his favorite dick, Cas straddled his chest. His hand brushed Dean’s stomach as he reached down and back to push—“Fuck, Cas,”—two fingers into himself like it was nothing.

The twitch Cas’s dick gave when he reached the lowest knuckle and twisted his wrist was more than Dean could take. He tried to reach out but came up short because of the bindings he hadn’t so much forgotten as ignored, then tugged again just for the feeling of it. Licking his lips, he watched Cas’s fingers drag out, twist in, wring a drop of fluid from his dick.

“Can I blow you?” The precome slid slowly down Cas’s glans and Dean thirsted for it. “Just until you’re ready, just a taste, please, just—”

“Just the tip?” Even as he mocked, Cas shuffled forward on his knees. It was an awkward waddle, his legs wide around Dean’s ribs and his hand still inside himself, but it brought him closer and that was all that mattered. “Anything to get your mouth on me, is that how badly you want it?”

“You know it is.” What he wanted so badly was within reach; he could’ve gotten his taste if he stuck out his tongue, but he waited for Cas to give it to him. “Any time my choices are sucking your dick or _not_ sucking your—”

Moving in another inch, Cas bumped his dick into Dean’s lower lip; he shut up and accepted it for the gift it was with a thankful groan. With the way he was stretched back on the pillow, he had to lift his head just to get his mouth around the head, and even without pushing to take it deeper, the angle pulled at his shoulders and neck uncomfortably. It still might’ve been his favorite part of the evening so far.

He knew all the ways Cas liked to be licked and sucked, and _just the tip_ was a favorite that conveniently didn’t get him off too quickly; but hopefully it would be enough along with his prep that the playing field would be a little more even when he started taking what he wanted from Dean. There was no possible way he would be able to last long once Cas was riding him, so he rolled his tongue all around the sensitive head and flicked it over the slit as Cas twitched between his lips.

“Mm, yes. This was a good idea, Dean.”

It was a damn shame that he didn’t have a good angle to see Cas fingering himself anymore, but he could hear the slick, wet noises of lube and skin. Then there were the sounds Cas made, little contented hums in between telling Dean how good it all was. How good Dean was.

“Look at you,” Cas said, his voice soft and wondering in a way Dean would never get used to—or sick of—having directed at him. “Is this what you needed? It is, isn’t it. More than a blowjob, more than getting to fuck me. I could tell you you don’t get too come at all tonight and you’d still be happy as long as you got your taste of cock, wouldn’t you?”

Some kind of agreement whined at the back of Dean’s throat. He didn’t know if he gave it enough voice to get out or not, but it hardly mattered when Cas knew him so well.

Cas’s breathy, “yeah,” could’ve been about Dean, but it also could’ve been a reaction to whatever his tensing arm was doing. “I’m glad you got what you wanted; I hope for your sake that it was enough to satisfy you. Because I want your cock in me now, and I don’t think you’re flexible enough for both.”

“Fuck.” Dropping his head back on the pillow, Dean lost himself in that image for a minute as Cas pulled back and positioned himself over Dean’s hips. He would absolutely break in half if he tried it, but—fuck.

“You like that?” Cas’s fingers teased the lacy edge of Dean’s panties, almost but not quite tickling as they brushed across his skin, then he started to slip them down with cruel slowness. “Of course you do. It’s a shame; it really is impossible. But I’m sure we could come up with an alternative that doesn’t fall too short of your fantasies. My ass may be too far away for you to put your cock in, but I could probably be convinced to put my mouth to use.”

He tugged the panties off Dean’s dick as he said it. The move was sudden and surprising after the previous languid attentions to them, and his dick slapping up against his stomach combined with the dirty talk—as good as a promise for the future, from his experience—very nearly did Dean in before he could put it to better use. Cas brought the waistband down to tuck underneath his balls; it fit snuggly, taut against his skin, and pushed everything up just a little more. He hoped it looked pretty, because it felt like it should.

“I’m going to ride you now, Dean.” Wrapping a hand around Dean’s dick, Cas settled into place with his lower legs holding his weight to either side. His voice stayed remarkably calm even as he lined up and started to sink down on Dean, though Dean had to call on every ounce of willpower left in him to keep from pushing up into it. Cas was so perfectly ready for him, hot and wet, loose enough that taking Dean wasn’t a struggle but tight enough that Dean felt every inch of it.

“You don’t need to do anything but lie there and take it,” Cas added.

Which was good. When Cas started to rock onto him, he _couldn’t_ do anything but lie there and take it. Cas moved slowly, grinding his hips in small circles until he found the ideal angle; when he hit it, his head tipped back and his mouth dropped open. Cas in the throes of ecstasy was a work of art. Then he surprised Dean by not speeding up or going harder. He kept his pace slow, deliberate, tortuous—for both of them, though it helped Dean hold himself together.

Cas’s hands dropped to Dean’s chest. Never halting his rhythm, he slid them up to Dean’s nipples and just rubbed there for a few easy minutes; first with wide motions of his palms, then more focused circles with his thumbs around the hardening nubs. Up to that point, Dean had been obediently pliant and still, but he arched his chest helplessly into the touch and strained against the tie to try and chase it down.

Leaning his weight forward to push Dean back down, Cas looked him in the eye and repeated, “Lie there. Take it. Let _me_ take what I want.”

So Dean did.

Like he’d just been waiting for that final drop, Cas scaled up the intensity all at once: riding Dean hard and deep, flicking a nail back and forth over one nipple while he pinched and twisted the other, all the while calling Dean _perfect_ and _gorgeous_ and all kinds of other things that he could only bear to hear when he was too overwhelmed to object. It didn’t stop Cas from saying them other times, but it was moments like these when he could really bask in them without doubt.

Because he was making Cas feel so good, and all he had to do was be himself. All he had to do was fight off his orgasm a little longer, hold it back until—

“ _Dean_.” Cas slowed to a shudder on top of him. His dick jerked out his climax untouched, messy over Dean’s stomach and so drawn out that his legs started trembling partway through. The clench of it around Dean was enough to drag him along over the edge, but even though he’d been waiting so long to finally let go, his own pleasure took a backseat to the beauty that was Cas coming. Coming apart.

They were both shaking by the time Cas dropped his hands off Dean’s chest and fell forward onto him. Even Dean’s lips felt numb, but that didn’t stop him from pushing them sloppily against Cas’s as they breathed together, tremors subsiding into peaceful exhaustion.

* * *

“You know, it wasn’t easy finding a pair that looked this good on me,” Dean said pointedly, waving the red lace panties vaguely in Cas’s direction as they wandered to the bathroom to clean up.

Snatching them out of his hand and throwing them vaguely in the hamper’s direction, Cas deliberately missed the point. “Did I not show my appreciation thoroughly enough?”

“I don’t think any amount of cleaning will make them wearable again.”

“I’ll buy you more,” Cas promised, dropping a kiss on his shoulder on the way to the shower. “When I get myself a new tie to replace the one you ruined.”

“Jackass.”

“I love you too, Dean.”

**Author's Note:**

> [I exist on tumblr!](http://alxdiamond.tumblr.com/post/160422070998/breaking-down-on-the-way-to-give-a-talk-at-kansas) Come say hi if you'd like.


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